So, they get bundled. A cell phone is a PDA/C, a personal digital assistant/communicator.
Heck, I'd love one of those things. But it seems, every time I've gotten excited and tried them, it's turned out that I could have drawn pictures better than the ones the crap optics of the cellphone gives me, the PDA cant even handle DST changes and the audio is a PITA to transfer (altho, from what I've heard, that's gotten better these days).
So instead of one device with all of those things bundled I get to carry all four devices plus the unusable crap in the cellphone which makes that one less useful than it could have been.
What I'd really like would be a standardized personal network protocol that could allow me to have a CPU for the processing, a storage device for saving stuff, a CCD+optics device for taking pictures, a GSM/3G module for dialling out, a display device for showing me information from the various other devices and an audio device/headset for hearing stuff and talking. And no redundant functions between them. No monitor on the GSM module or CCD module, no storage in them, etc. I could take the small function specific devices with me as I wanted, and swap out devices as there were better ones available.
But, well, not going to happen soon. So the next thing I'm looking for is something like the OpenMoko; a general purpose computer that happens to have a GSM module. That one I can at least patch when it craps out and doesnt do what I want it to do.
"a method to apply cheaper and wider access to music, albeit with restrictions."
In a free market competition drives cheaper prices. Intellectual monopoly products have no competition apart from the yarrr mateys. Prevent copying (or any form of competition) and you get more expensive, not cheaper, music.
Must make for some good 'competition' in the electronics market.
Well, one can seriously wonder about people who buy computer equipment at Media Markt. They're yet another of those 'trick the consumer into visiting our shop by advertising products we don't have for prices we wont sell them for then talk them into a sale' corporations that don't even dare list their prices on comparison sites.
I wouldn't trust them to sell me an electric toothbrush, nevermind a CPU.
In practice, when you have a large, multinational organization with many subnets and even more SMTP senders, it simply doesn't make economic sense
That rather makes me wonder how those large, multinational organizations are configured. Working for one such organization, I can say that all outgoing mail is routed through centralized mail infrastructure. And port 25 going out is firewalled. No audit needed, we know exactly what hosts are allowed to send and they can be counted on one hand.
As we're nowhere near the paranoid-fascist end of the security scale, so I have a hard time seeing what large organizations dont centralize their mail. I mean, anyone that didn't would most likely find they didn't need an SPF record because the outgoing spam would mean they'd probably end up in every blacklist in the world and be unable to mail at all.
if I can be personally punished for making a mistake,
Well, they'd have to put you in front of a jury to punish you, of course.
And, of course, civic duty, mumble mumble, doing the right thing, mumble, its own reward, mumble.
Really, tho, the system should contain more incentive to reach the *right* verdict, rather than *a* verdict or a sides verdict, and while that might include the jury, it should definitely contain stronger incentives for the other members of the system.
As far as I've seen, DNS blocks are pretty standard for this type of blocking in 'the free world'.
Basically, maybe they don't care whether people get around the block.
Well, if the assholes at IFPI cant access the site anymore, maybe they'll stop complaining. And, hey, it's a best effort deal, most other possible blocking methods would risk catching even more innocent and entirely unrelated sites, without being much harder to bypass.
My company doesn't automatically let through any mail that comes from paypa1.com. It does, however, have several domains in whitelists, from which I do recieve a load of (forged header) spam. SPF or domainkeys filtering would allow them to keep the whitelist, while autojunking anything else purporting to be from the whitelisted domains.
I am annoyed that something so simple and easy as SPF isn't ubiquitous yet.
No shit. Last year I can recall a bank here had problems with loads of phishing mails purporting to be from them. When I checked, they didn't even have an SPF record, which would have, at least, instakilled the messages in some spamfilters.
Checking today, they've actually fixed that problem. So at least it's getting better.
While I agree with your first conclusion, this one is doubtful. The loonies did try that once during the oil crisis (1973, iirc), and the result was simply a bunch of bankrupcies in the west and decreased sales and eventually lower price. As long as they actually want to maximize their income they cant raise the prices beyond certain levels (and that includes levels that would make alternative fuels more popular).
So it's a mutual addiction; they want the money and the US wants the cheap energy, which keeps prices just below the pain limit but not lower or higher. The European way of enforcing a lower dependence through taxes seems smarter in retrospect, and at the very least offers a wider field of options when the oil runs out. (Though those perpetually higher prices also indicate that alternative fuels would not have been developed within past oil price ranges; adaption would have been accomplished through lower use of cars, less suburban sprawl and so on.
And protecting oil interests is most likely a play on words anyway. As I've pointed out, it's unlikely that the actual end price to the US consumer would have fluctuated much due to economics, so the 'oil interests' in question are most likely the oil corporations rather than any nebulous national interest.
If it's really crap like you say, is it really worth listening to at all?
To a large extent it isn't. Compare the lists at user fed sites like last.fm with billboard lists; the overlap is not particularly impressive. Apparently the RIAA labels have yet to go payola on last.fm's ass. Perhaps they'll catch up eventually and screw those listings too, but as yet they only seem to influence them indirectly through other channel payola.
Why even download it "for free" if you think it's crap?
Well, apparently people don't even do that as much as the labels might wish. I recall a recent article mentioning, I think, EMI execs who finally got the message when the group of youngsters they had invited for advice were offered a table of complimentary CD's. And nobody took any.
It's rather amusing to watch last.fm's top list for the moment. Radiohead is somewhat overrepresented.
sometimes the anti-RIAA crowds neglect to mention them.
Sometimes, yes. So I can only recommend using last.fm and/or pandora or similar sites to build your interest lists and buy through emusic or other largely independent sites. I'm spending more money on music now than I have ever done in my life as I'm actually finding music I'm interested in, rather than the crap peddled by the RIAA.
Really it is just saying that they don't believe that women can invent useful things
Actually it's saying that prior to the 20th century nobody with the resources to make a difference gave a crap.
Had it, on the other hand, been a problem preventing activities such as engaging in warfare, heavy manual labor or just been discomforting and impractical for nobility and merchants, I would suggest it would have been a highly prioritized and heavily funded field of research.
A dual processor machine, or some dedicated encoding / decoding hardware might have been able to though
Usually that would be a hardware MPEG2 encoder and decoder. That used to be how it was done in the 90's, any TV card basically had to have it; you couldn't do realtime mpeg compression on a general purpose CPU until they came close to the gigahertz mark.
But whatever method you used to handle the video processing, you still had to pass it through the OS making the obvious method of playback to record and play off a buffered stream.
That's the main difference between a DVR and a VCR.
No, actually, that's the fundamental mode of operation of digital capture cards. They more or less require you to bounce the stream through the OS, from where you can watch, pause it, play with it. They usually have only one tuner per ADC chip, and usually no passthrough.
In fact, making a device with multiple capturecards that _couldn't_ record and play at the same time would be more work.
Housing prices SHOULD go up if Google brings more money into the economy, increasing demand for housing.
Ah, but why should _money creation_ go up if Google brings more money? Money creation should have a fundamental value backing it; the vagaries of corporate locations isn't a reliable value to base currency creation on. (And note it works both ways; long-term valuations would slow descents as well).
Denying the use of short-term price fluctuations as collateral for credit derived money creation doesn't change the fact that prices will rise. But they will rise according to market demand and available income (want to bid more than the bank can loan you with the house as collateral? Then you have to save for it and risk your own actual money), not as a function of the former my-bank-is-less-responsible-than-yours theory of setting prices.
It's fraud.
Without a doubt. There are, however, easier and harder ways to move towards full-reserve banking. Demanding long-term valuations of collateral is one step that will slow the rampant excesses and partially negate the feedback loop (and one that, considering the recent excessive credit-derived bubbles might actually have a reasonable chance of passing, while at the same time making people more aware of the actual mechanics of money creation). From there you can move on to other more stringent demands.
Simply demanding the abolition of the Fed is simply not a prospect with much chance of success.
The granddaddy of all multipliers (the Fed) has been active for the past few weeks, trying to pump some money into the economy.
Of course, as the banks have already so oversaturated the market with loan-generated fantasy money that not even the Fed can input the liquidity needed. It just disappears down the drain as fast as they can pump it in; eaten by accelerating writeoffs.
Put your money in the bank? Have you seen the latest data on the NFORBRES? The US banks have gone into _negative reserve_ territory. They have no reserves left that arent borrowed. The multiplicatory spiral is rapidly unwinding. Apart from treasuries it's hard to find a place where you can put your money and be certain it isnt simply wiped out in the ensuing... adjustments. I can certainly understand the desire to put ones money in gold.
Heck, I'm definitely not a Ron Paul guy, nor a gold standard supporter, but the current idea of debt based money secured against the value of objects valued at a price depending on how easy it is to get a loan is idiotic. That shortcircuits the systems so you can print more money when asset values go up and asset values go up as you print more money. Until they dont. And you suddenly find yourself in an unwind where you cant print money fast enough to replace the fictional numbers lost.
banks can't make loans to support people who are trying to start businesses or buy houses
Banks made loans secured against fantasy values. Now they cant get those imaginary values out of the defaulting loans. This is depleting their capital and killing their ability to make new loans. Just as in the inflationary spiral raised the imaginary value of their security, the deflationary contraction spiral decreases the values of their security and the money they made up disappears. Dont blame the few trying to protect what assets they have; their flight to gold is a fart in a hurricane compared to the credit unwind and destruction of credit-based multiplier money.
Of course, this is a natural artifact of a fractional reserve system and any such system is doomed to repeat the bubble phenomena time and time again. Moving to a full reserve system would perhaps solve it, but there are easier ways to (at least partially) deal with it.
Personally I'd favour enforcing mandatory long-term valuations for any collateral; for example, a bank would only be able to use the (inflation adjusted) 10-30 year average value for a house as collateral; want to pay more than that and you'll have to pay for it yourself. You might still end up with bubbles, but at least they'd be much more long-term and easier for the rest of the economy to adjust to. And valuations would not be as susceptible to the ease of borrowing.
Uh huh. I find it more likely that we'll see a huge advance in on-site corporate cell and wireless blockers, to prevent exactly that 'each machine with a direct internet connection'. They didnt build and implement all those pesky internet filters just to have the employees stick an cell card in their laptop and bypass it.
Not to mention that comparatively, wireless is about as fast as a dial-up modem used to be ten years ago. You can live with it. If you have no other choice.
Personally I need/want gigabit speeds to the desktop to implement diskless iSCSI-SAN-based clients at work, and lets just say wireless doesn't quite cut it for that, nor do I expect it to ever do that in a high-density area like an office.
Would you have any higher opinion if the employees of such a rich corporation were poor?
Of course not. The response was to 'creating a large amount of wealth'. Wealth is only created within an economy as an alternative to other wealth created by the same resources. As such, competetively produced wealth generates more percieved total wealth than non-competetively produced wealth.
As Microsoft has been notoriously anticompetetive, both in their practices and derived from the mistake called 'intellectual property', parts of the wealth they've gained is wealth lost by the economy as a whole.
I would, and do, have a much higher opinion corporations who share the profits of their competetive successes with their employees; that's a situation where everybody wins.
This created an incredible amount of wealth for his employees...
Which was taken from other parts of the economy and, in the case of anticompetetive practices, from other peoples employees.
He built a market for third parties.
On third parties you mean. Within the Microsoft sphere you can make exactly as much money as Microsoft lets you; get too popular and they cut off your airsupply. The lucky companies got bought, but most were simply killed off.
How about Apple?
Apple is hardly a posterboy for a competetive market either.
He brought down the price of software. Before Microsoft people were charging a fortune for software
Hardly. Software for similar class computers was often cheaper in those days; Amiga, Atari and other low end home computers had a thriving ecosystem of inexpensive software producers. Microsofts ride on IBM into the business world more likely extended higher prices for longer than they'd have survived without MS. And probably held back software development several years.
Oracle, IBM or many other vendors?
The computing industry is full of expensive crapware. Neither Apple, Sun, IBM or Oracle have a clean history. Nor are they poster boys for free market capitalism. Some seem to have learned a lesson, while some are hardly shining examples today, even compared with Microsoft (Apple, Oracle).
Microsoft and Bill Gates will not look like the villain that many like to portray.
Yes they will. While many others are as bad or worse, only Microsoft has had the sheer prevalence to hold back progress and damage the field of computing that much.
Mainly it's the flawed concept of intellectual monopoly law that's been the weapon in their hand, but the decision to use it against the free market as they have was theirs.
short of a huge housing market crash, but I don't know anyone who thinks the 50% drop some in this discussion are talking about is credible
I'm so amazed at ideas like this. I mean, you see drops in that range in the US, you read about construction companies offloading inventory at 60 cents on the dollar, you see courthouse auctions in he US that don't even get bids for more than a few percent of inventory, how do you manage to ignore that data?
We've seen prices go up 100%; heck, I've seen my own real estate first triple, then double again in ten years. How hard do you have to not look to think it can't go down as much as it's gone up? How hard do you have to shut your eyes to believe it cant go down even a third of what it's gone up?
Have you seen Schillers graph on inflation adjusted real estate pricing over the last 100 years? This is the, without comparison, largest real estate bubble since the 1890's. Prices have become so far disconnected from the historical 1% plus inflation price increase it would be humorous if it weren't for the actual painful losses this will cause. A 50% drop is the good case 'adjustment' where prices remain somewhat above their historical average.
But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan
It is effectively just a loan. To a 'bank' with the equivalent of No Income, No Job and No Assets. We've seen how well that worked out for the mortgage industry. I hardly see it working better for the government institutions doing the same thing.
A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow
That's fairly well underway. Funds freezing withdrawals, hedge funds collapsing, bonds being uncovered, etc. The trouble with financing bubbles like the housing market is that assets that seemed to cover the loans in the rising market don't cover them anymore in the falling market. A whole lot of that imaginary money is now gone, and a whole lot of those underwriting the imaginary money are now technically insolvent. This is not a liquidity crisis, this is a solvency crisis, and if you're too late in moving your money out of those assets you're not going to get your money back.
Even if we do all lose £1k each because of the government intervention, it's still a lot less in real terms than we would have lost if they hadn't intervened and things had gone south fast.
See, that's what the bail-them-out guys don't get, in a liquidity crisis that would have been right. In a solvency crisis, the loan doesn't help, the money's gone. Now you've thrown away £1k each, and will throw away another... and another... and another. And it will still go south.
it's underwriting the everyday people who have savings with Rock.
If it wanted to protect everyday people with savings with the bank they could still have let it fail and simply paid out the account insurance. What it is protecting is bond investors, whose money would explicitly not be covered in a bank crash (the fact that there is an overlap between 'savers' and 'bond investors' where the savers imagine that bonds are 'safe' is perhaps sad but not particularly relevant. A variable rate savings account is one thing, a long term fixed (and much higher rate) bond is another.).
If you propose we go on and save everyone with money in mortgage bonds this is going to become quite expensive for the tax payers. And, in my opinion, quite unfair to both those who do not have large assets, and those who have put their assets in state bonds or other safer, but much less lucrative papers.
But Northern Rock's problem was not primarily that they did not have the money
The initial problem may have been a liquidity crunch, but the subsequent problem is that they do not, in fact, have the money. They cannot sell their mortgages for the booked value on the market today, they cannot borrow against them, they cannot in any way obtain the money needed. This is not a liquidity problem, this is a solvency problem.
so did almost everyone else in recent years
Yeah, well, some didn't.
The fact is, 'everyone else' will also get what's coming. The sheer scale of this bubble outclasses most before, and it will hit even the most conservative lenders. Even the ones that didn't lend to more than 90% are in trouble; 90% loan on a house valued at 200% of historical markets is still 180% of loan-to-value when the market's settled.
Perhaps we'll get regulation requiring longer term valuations for collateral to avoid further asset bubbles, but that's far in the future. This time unwinding of debt will be excrutiating.
For wearing out: Li-Ion. They simply do that. Li-Ion batteries have a limited lifespan of approximately 3 years. Usage doesnt affect it much; temperature does. Put them next to a hot CPU and they'll die within a year, put them in the freezer and they wont lose more than 2% capacity per year. And of course, you dont really know how long the product's been in the shelf at the shop...
Basically, if you hardly ever use them, take them out and stick them in the freezer or at least in a fridge (allow thawing before use).
For the price: The non-standard form-factors make it an uncompetetive (and expensive) if not outright profitable segment.
Personally I avoid products with li-ion batteries like the plague. I can deal with it if they take standard size batteries, but with the soldered in crap? I prefer my expensive electronics to last slightly longer than a bottle of milk in the sunshine...
"What they are doing is trying to find ways of monetizing their services."
Um, no. They're monetizing people using _other_ companies services. You get it for free if you _only_ offer the MS service, you have to pay to if you want to offer someone elses service.
Best thing to do is to just hang up on them if they call. It's not a company that will ever learn, and history shows that any deals made with Microsoft has only one winner and it ain't you.
Ah. I have an MSI board myself. After discovering I needed XP to flash it it became my first and last MSI board (your board might actually be flashable from DOS at least).
My Asus boards on the other hand will update from USB, floppy, dos, etc. Corrupted BIOS? Just stick an USB disk with a fresh bios in a port and it will load...
I buy other brands once in a while, but this far I've ended up disappointed, and more and more inclined to just buy Asus every time..
Slashdot Mirror
So, they get bundled. A cell phone is a PDA/C, a personal digital assistant/communicator.
Heck, I'd love one of those things. But it seems, every time I've gotten excited and tried them, it's turned out that I could have drawn pictures better than the ones the crap optics of the cellphone gives me, the PDA cant even handle DST changes and the audio is a PITA to transfer (altho, from what I've heard, that's gotten better these days).
So instead of one device with all of those things bundled I get to carry all four devices plus the unusable crap in the cellphone which makes that one less useful than it could have been.
What I'd really like would be a standardized personal network protocol that could allow me to have a CPU for the processing, a storage device for saving stuff, a CCD+optics device for taking pictures, a GSM/3G module for dialling out, a display device for showing me information from the various other devices and an audio device/headset for hearing stuff and talking. And no redundant functions between them. No monitor on the GSM module or CCD module, no storage in them, etc. I could take the small function specific devices with me as I wanted, and swap out devices as there were better ones available.
But, well, not going to happen soon. So the next thing I'm looking for is something like the OpenMoko; a general purpose computer that happens to have a GSM module. That one I can at least patch when it craps out and doesnt do what I want it to do.
"a method to apply cheaper and wider access to music, albeit with restrictions."
In a free market competition drives cheaper prices. Intellectual monopoly products have no competition apart from the yarrr mateys. Prevent copying (or any form of competition) and you get more expensive, not cheaper, music.
So, no, DRM is never beneficial.
Must make for some good 'competition' in the electronics market.
Well, one can seriously wonder about people who buy computer equipment at Media Markt. They're yet another of those 'trick the consumer into visiting our shop by advertising products we don't have for prices we wont sell them for then talk them into a sale' corporations that don't even dare list their prices on comparison sites.
I wouldn't trust them to sell me an electric toothbrush, nevermind a CPU.
In practice, when you have a large, multinational organization with many subnets and even more SMTP senders, it simply doesn't make economic sense
That rather makes me wonder how those large, multinational organizations are configured. Working for one such organization, I can say that all outgoing mail is routed through centralized mail infrastructure. And port 25 going out is firewalled. No audit needed, we know exactly what hosts are allowed to send and they can be counted on one hand.
As we're nowhere near the paranoid-fascist end of the security scale, so I have a hard time seeing what large organizations dont centralize their mail. I mean, anyone that didn't would most likely find they didn't need an SPF record because the outgoing spam would mean they'd probably end up in every blacklist in the world and be unable to mail at all.
if I can be personally punished for making a mistake,
Well, they'd have to put you in front of a jury to punish you, of course.
And, of course, civic duty, mumble mumble, doing the right thing, mumble, its own reward, mumble.
Really, tho, the system should contain more incentive to reach the *right* verdict, rather than *a* verdict or a sides verdict, and while that might include the jury, it should definitely contain stronger incentives for the other members of the system.
As far as I've seen, DNS blocks are pretty standard for this type of blocking in 'the free world'.
Basically, maybe they don't care whether people get around the block.
Well, if the assholes at IFPI cant access the site anymore, maybe they'll stop complaining. And, hey, it's a best effort deal, most other possible blocking methods would risk catching even more innocent and entirely unrelated sites, without being much harder to bypass.
My company doesn't automatically let through any mail that comes from paypa1.com. It does, however, have several domains in whitelists, from which I do recieve a load of (forged header) spam. SPF or domainkeys filtering would allow them to keep the whitelist, while autojunking anything else purporting to be from the whitelisted domains.
I am annoyed that something so simple and easy as SPF isn't ubiquitous yet.
No shit. Last year I can recall a bank here had problems with loads of phishing mails purporting to be from them. When I checked, they didn't even have an SPF record, which would have, at least, instakilled the messages in some spamfilters.
Checking today, they've actually fixed that problem. So at least it's getting better.
oil prices would be sky high
While I agree with your first conclusion, this one is doubtful. The loonies did try that once during the oil crisis (1973, iirc), and the result was simply a bunch of bankrupcies in the west and decreased sales and eventually lower price. As long as they actually want to maximize their income they cant raise the prices beyond certain levels (and that includes levels that would make alternative fuels more popular).
So it's a mutual addiction; they want the money and the US wants the cheap energy, which keeps prices just below the pain limit but not lower or higher. The European way of enforcing a lower dependence through taxes seems smarter in retrospect, and at the very least offers a wider field of options when the oil runs out. (Though those perpetually higher prices also indicate that alternative fuels would not have been developed within past oil price ranges; adaption would have been accomplished through lower use of cars, less suburban sprawl and so on.
And protecting oil interests is most likely a play on words anyway. As I've pointed out, it's unlikely that the actual end price to the US consumer would have fluctuated much due to economics, so the 'oil interests' in question are most likely the oil corporations rather than any nebulous national interest.
If it's really crap like you say, is it really worth listening to at all?
To a large extent it isn't. Compare the lists at user fed sites like last.fm with billboard lists; the overlap is not particularly impressive. Apparently the RIAA labels have yet to go payola on last.fm's ass. Perhaps they'll catch up eventually and screw those listings too, but as yet they only seem to influence them indirectly through other channel payola.
Why even download it "for free" if you think it's crap?
Well, apparently people don't even do that as much as the labels might wish. I recall a recent article mentioning, I think, EMI execs who finally got the message when the group of youngsters they had invited for advice were offered a table of complimentary CD's. And nobody took any.
It's rather amusing to watch last.fm's top list for the moment. Radiohead is somewhat overrepresented.
sometimes the anti-RIAA crowds neglect to mention them.
Sometimes, yes. So I can only recommend using last.fm and/or pandora or similar sites to build your interest lists and buy through emusic or other largely independent sites. I'm spending more money on music now than I have ever done in my life as I'm actually finding music I'm interested in, rather than the crap peddled by the RIAA.
Really it is just saying that they don't believe that women can invent useful things
Actually it's saying that prior to the 20th century nobody with the resources to make a difference gave a crap.
Had it, on the other hand, been a problem preventing activities such as engaging in warfare, heavy manual labor or just been discomforting and impractical for nobility and merchants, I would suggest it would have been a highly prioritized and heavily funded field of research.
A dual processor machine, or some dedicated encoding / decoding hardware might have been able to though
Usually that would be a hardware MPEG2 encoder and decoder. That used to be how it was done in the 90's, any TV card basically had to have it; you couldn't do realtime mpeg compression on a general purpose CPU until they came close to the gigahertz mark.
But whatever method you used to handle the video processing, you still had to pass it through the OS making the obvious method of playback to record and play off a buffered stream.
If men had been the ones carrying the babies I'd betcha good money that we'd have had artificial wombs perfected in the 1930's.
That's the main difference between a DVR and a VCR.
No, actually, that's the fundamental mode of operation of digital capture cards. They more or less require you to bounce the stream through the OS, from where you can watch, pause it, play with it. They usually have only one tuner per ADC chip, and usually no passthrough.
In fact, making a device with multiple capturecards that _couldn't_ record and play at the same time would be more work.
Housing prices SHOULD go up if Google brings more money into the economy, increasing demand for housing.
Ah, but why should _money creation_ go up if Google brings more money? Money creation should have a fundamental value backing it; the vagaries of corporate locations isn't a reliable value to base currency creation on. (And note it works both ways; long-term valuations would slow descents as well).
Denying the use of short-term price fluctuations as collateral for credit derived money creation doesn't change the fact that prices will rise. But they will rise according to market demand and available income (want to bid more than the bank can loan you with the house as collateral? Then you have to save for it and risk your own actual money), not as a function of the former my-bank-is-less-responsible-than-yours theory of setting prices.
It's fraud.
Without a doubt. There are, however, easier and harder ways to move towards full-reserve banking. Demanding long-term valuations of collateral is one step that will slow the rampant excesses and partially negate the feedback loop (and one that, considering the recent excessive credit-derived bubbles might actually have a reasonable chance of passing, while at the same time making people more aware of the actual mechanics of money creation). From there you can move on to other more stringent demands.
Simply demanding the abolition of the Fed is simply not a prospect with much chance of success.
The granddaddy of all multipliers (the Fed) has been active for the past few weeks, trying to pump some money into the economy.
Of course, as the banks have already so oversaturated the market with loan-generated fantasy money that not even the Fed can input the liquidity needed. It just disappears down the drain as fast as they can pump it in; eaten by accelerating writeoffs.
Put your money in the bank? Have you seen the latest data on the NFORBRES? The US banks have gone into _negative reserve_ territory. They have no reserves left that arent borrowed. The multiplicatory spiral is rapidly unwinding. Apart from treasuries it's hard to find a place where you can put your money and be certain it isnt simply wiped out in the ensuing... adjustments. I can certainly understand the desire to put ones money in gold.
Heck, I'm definitely not a Ron Paul guy, nor a gold standard supporter, but the current idea of debt based money secured against the value of objects valued at a price depending on how easy it is to get a loan is idiotic. That shortcircuits the systems so you can print more money when asset values go up and asset values go up as you print more money. Until they dont. And you suddenly find yourself in an unwind where you cant print money fast enough to replace the fictional numbers lost.
banks can't make loans to support people who are trying to start businesses or buy houses
Banks made loans secured against fantasy values. Now they cant get those imaginary values out of the defaulting loans. This is depleting their capital and killing their ability to make new loans. Just as in the inflationary spiral raised the imaginary value of their security, the deflationary contraction spiral decreases the values of their security and the money they made up disappears. Dont blame the few trying to protect what assets they have; their flight to gold is a fart in a hurricane compared to the credit unwind and destruction of credit-based multiplier money.
Of course, this is a natural artifact of a fractional reserve system and any such system is doomed to repeat the bubble phenomena time and time again. Moving to a full reserve system would perhaps solve it, but there are easier ways to (at least partially) deal with it.
Personally I'd favour enforcing mandatory long-term valuations for any collateral; for example, a bank would only be able to use the (inflation adjusted) 10-30 year average value for a house as collateral; want to pay more than that and you'll have to pay for it yourself. You might still end up with bubbles, but at least they'd be much more long-term and easier for the rest of the economy to adjust to. And valuations would not be as susceptible to the ease of borrowing.
Uh huh. I find it more likely that we'll see a huge advance in on-site corporate cell and wireless blockers, to prevent exactly that 'each machine with a direct internet connection'. They didnt build and implement all those pesky internet filters just to have the employees stick an cell card in their laptop and bypass it.
Not to mention that comparatively, wireless is about as fast as a dial-up modem used to be ten years ago. You can live with it. If you have no other choice.
Personally I need/want gigabit speeds to the desktop to implement diskless iSCSI-SAN-based clients at work, and lets just say wireless doesn't quite cut it for that, nor do I expect it to ever do that in a high-density area like an office.
Would you have any higher opinion if the employees of such a rich corporation were poor?
Of course not. The response was to 'creating a large amount of wealth'. Wealth is only created within an economy as an alternative to other wealth created by the same resources. As such, competetively produced wealth generates more percieved total wealth than non-competetively produced wealth.
As Microsoft has been notoriously anticompetetive, both in their practices and derived from the mistake called 'intellectual property', parts of the wealth they've gained is wealth lost by the economy as a whole.
I would, and do, have a much higher opinion corporations who share the profits of their competetive successes with their employees; that's a situation where everybody wins.
This created an incredible amount of wealth for his employees...
Which was taken from other parts of the economy and, in the case of anticompetetive practices, from other peoples employees.
He built a market for third parties.
On third parties you mean. Within the Microsoft sphere you can make exactly as much money as Microsoft lets you; get too popular and they cut off your airsupply. The lucky companies got bought, but most were simply killed off.
How about Apple?
Apple is hardly a posterboy for a competetive market either.
He brought down the price of software. Before Microsoft people were charging a fortune for software
Hardly. Software for similar class computers was often cheaper in those days; Amiga, Atari and other low end home computers had a thriving ecosystem of inexpensive software producers. Microsofts ride on IBM into the business world more likely extended higher prices for longer than they'd have survived without MS. And probably held back software development several years.
Oracle, IBM or many other vendors?
The computing industry is full of expensive crapware. Neither Apple, Sun, IBM or Oracle have a clean history. Nor are they poster boys for free market capitalism. Some seem to have learned a lesson, while some are hardly shining examples today, even compared with Microsoft (Apple, Oracle).
Microsoft and Bill Gates will not look like the villain that many like to portray.
Yes they will. While many others are as bad or worse, only Microsoft has had the sheer prevalence to hold back progress and damage the field of computing that much.
Mainly it's the flawed concept of intellectual monopoly law that's been the weapon in their hand, but the decision to use it against the free market as they have was theirs.
short of a huge housing market crash, but I don't know anyone who thinks the 50% drop some in this discussion are talking about is credible
I'm so amazed at ideas like this. I mean, you see drops in that range in the US, you read about construction companies offloading inventory at 60 cents on the dollar, you see courthouse auctions in he US that don't even get bids for more than a few percent of inventory, how do you manage to ignore that data?
We've seen prices go up 100%; heck, I've seen my own real estate first triple, then double again in ten years. How hard do you have to not look to think it can't go down as much as it's gone up? How hard do you have to shut your eyes to believe it cant go down even a third of what it's gone up?
Have you seen Schillers graph on inflation adjusted real estate pricing over the last 100 years? This is the, without comparison, largest real estate bubble since the 1890's. Prices have become so far disconnected from the historical 1% plus inflation price increase it would be humorous if it weren't for the actual painful losses this will cause. A 50% drop is the good case 'adjustment' where prices remain somewhat above their historical average.
But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan
It is effectively just a loan. To a 'bank' with the equivalent of No Income, No Job and No Assets. We've seen how well that worked out for the mortgage industry. I hardly see it working better for the government institutions doing the same thing.
A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow
That's fairly well underway. Funds freezing withdrawals, hedge funds collapsing, bonds being uncovered, etc. The trouble with financing bubbles like the housing market is that assets that seemed to cover the loans in the rising market don't cover them anymore in the falling market. A whole lot of that imaginary money is now gone, and a whole lot of those underwriting the imaginary money are now technically insolvent. This is not a liquidity crisis, this is a solvency crisis, and if you're too late in moving your money out of those assets you're not going to get your money back.
Even if we do all lose £1k each because of the government intervention, it's still a lot less in real terms than we would have lost if they hadn't intervened and things had gone south fast.
See, that's what the bail-them-out guys don't get, in a liquidity crisis that would have been right. In a solvency crisis, the loan doesn't help, the money's gone. Now you've thrown away £1k each, and will throw away another... and another... and another. And it will still go south.
it's underwriting the everyday people who have savings with Rock.
If it wanted to protect everyday people with savings with the bank they could still have let it fail and simply paid out the account insurance. What it is protecting is bond investors, whose money would explicitly not be covered in a bank crash (the fact that there is an overlap between 'savers' and 'bond investors' where the savers imagine that bonds are 'safe' is perhaps sad but not particularly relevant. A variable rate savings account is one thing, a long term fixed (and much higher rate) bond is another.).
If you propose we go on and save everyone with money in mortgage bonds this is going to become quite expensive for the tax payers. And, in my opinion, quite unfair to both those who do not have large assets, and those who have put their assets in state bonds or other safer, but much less lucrative papers.
But Northern Rock's problem was not primarily that they did not have the money
The initial problem may have been a liquidity crunch, but the subsequent problem is that they do not, in fact, have the money. They cannot sell their mortgages for the booked value on the market today, they cannot borrow against them, they cannot in any way obtain the money needed. This is not a liquidity problem, this is a solvency problem.
so did almost everyone else in recent years
Yeah, well, some didn't.
The fact is, 'everyone else' will also get what's coming. The sheer scale of this bubble outclasses most before, and it will hit even the most conservative lenders. Even the ones that didn't lend to more than 90% are in trouble; 90% loan on a house valued at 200% of historical markets is still 180% of loan-to-value when the market's settled.
Perhaps we'll get regulation requiring longer term valuations for collateral to avoid further asset bubbles, but that's far in the future. This time unwinding of debt will be excrutiating.
Is there a reason?
Yes.
For wearing out: Li-Ion. They simply do that. Li-Ion batteries have a limited lifespan of approximately 3 years. Usage doesnt affect it much; temperature does. Put them next to a hot CPU and they'll die within a year, put them in the freezer and they wont lose more than 2% capacity per year. And of course, you dont really know how long the product's been in the shelf at the shop...
Basically, if you hardly ever use them, take them out and stick them in the freezer or at least in a fridge (allow thawing before use).
For the price: The non-standard form-factors make it an uncompetetive (and expensive) if not outright profitable segment.
Personally I avoid products with li-ion batteries like the plague. I can deal with it if they take standard size batteries, but with the soldered in crap? I prefer my expensive electronics to last slightly longer than a bottle of milk in the sunshine...
"What they are doing is trying to find ways of monetizing their services."
Um, no. They're monetizing people using _other_ companies services. You get it for free if you _only_ offer the MS service, you have to pay to if you want to offer someone elses service.
Best thing to do is to just hang up on them if they call. It's not a company that will ever learn, and history shows that any deals made with Microsoft has only one winner and it ain't you.
I use a msi K9n4-sli
Ah. I have an MSI board myself. After discovering I needed XP to flash it it became my first and last MSI board (your board might actually be flashable from DOS at least).
My Asus boards on the other hand will update from USB, floppy, dos, etc. Corrupted BIOS? Just stick an USB disk with a fresh bios in a port and it will load...
I buy other brands once in a while, but this far I've ended up disappointed, and more and more inclined to just buy Asus every time..