The Fed has pumped several trillion dollars into the economy as direct purchases of the securities involved. I'm not sure where you are coming from in terms of the money charts, but this is from the direct intervention by the Fed into the markets.
Yes, I agree that the Fed pumped trillions of dollars into the economy. The reason they did that was to replace some of the trillions of dollars that had been destroyed. Those dollars were destroyed as surely as if they had been burned. And if the fed hadn't made new dollars to replace them, the collapse would have been far worse. But even with those trillions, there is less money in circulation now than there was in 2007. Until that changes there won't be broad spectrum inflationary pressures.
It is arcane because it requires an understanding of what money is. Money is created when banks lend it. It's destroyed when the value of the securing property bringing drops, the loan value with it. Since the bubble burst, banks have essentially stopped lending, so the only increase in the money supply is due to the Fed. And they've stopped lending because the repeal of Glass Stegall gave them more profitable and more dangerous things to do with our money. Why lend at 5% with a 3% chance of a loss, when you can earn 25% with a 15% chance of a loss? If they don't wise up, they're going to force us into having a Federal Bank that lends directly. Or they're going to bankrupt us again. In neither case would I want to be a banker.
Demand for consumer goods, especially food, has remained the same but the amount of money floating around has gone up.
That's just not true. The number of dollars that the Fed has pumped into the economy is tiny compared with the number of dollars that were destroyed when the bubble burst. Just look at an M3 chart, especially a long term one. The drop is astounding and unprecedented in recent history. It's the only drop in the money supply since 1970. Anyone who shows you a money supply chart that rises in that period is probably trying to sell you gold, and so they will hide the money that was destroyed by showing you something besides M3. Other than the gold sellers, the cries against "inflationary policies" are mainly coming from right wing politicians, many of whom were responsible in part for the policies that caused the bubble in first place. Their main goal is to use the current crisis to get the uneducated to blame the wrong party. They would love, and are working towards, worsening the crisis for next year's elections.
The US and other countries don't back their currency, which is why its value constantly decreases.
Not really on either count. Long term and to first order, the value of all currency in circulation is the value of the goods and services backing the loans that the money was created for. The value of the dollar constantly decreases because it is advantageous for the value to drop to encourage spending and/or productive investing. Therefore monetary policy is chosen such that a low level of constant inflation is targeted. Monetary policy could be changed to encourage deflation, but that would bring the economy to a screeching halt. Or we could encourage more inflation, but that encourages too much risky investing and hurts the creditors who are in charge of choosing our government.
The housing crisis was an example of what deflation is like. Housing values collapsed, making many mortgages worthless, which destroyed a vast amount of money. Banks became unwilling to lend money because it was much more valuable to them invested in securities than it was as a loan. I haven't quite understood explanations of why consumer prices weren't affected. Probably because most people already spend most of their money on necessities.
categorically false. a silver or gold dollar from 1789 to 1917 essentially had a constant value
You can call it "categorically false," but that just makes you someone who hasn't looked into it or a liar. I'll assume the former for now.
That the value was essentially the same in 1789 and 1917 doesn't mean that there were no cycles of inflation and deflation in between. Have a look at page 6 of this presentation. In it I see annual inflation of up to 20% and annual deflation of up to 19% in that time period. Then compare it to the relatively lower (absolute value) inflation after 1917.
Sorry if it doesn't match your preconceived notions of the superiority of gold as a currency.
Deflation is bad because it reduces the amount of BTC in effective circulation (i.e reduces spending of a currency because it will be worth more tomorrow). People will tend to hold BTC rather than spend, which means the people who accept BTC are more likely to stop accepting them. At the same time the merchants are more likely to hold the BTC they do get rather than selling them on an exchange. Since there will be fewer BTC on the exchange, the price will be driven up further.
Back when the US was using fully gold backed currency annual inflation and deflation were often extreme, and they were just as damaging then as now. There were times when there was 15% inflation one year followed by 15% deflation one or two years later.
And to contemplate eliminating human freedom and incentive would be demonic.
You only need to eliminate one of the two. Another name for "incentive" would be "scarcity" and eliminating it wouldn't be demonic.
For example, lets imagine two inventions. 1) A generator that provides unlimited free energy by turning matter into antimatter and annihilating it with matter. 2) A matter replicator that can replicate any material object. Essentially we're in the Star Trek-TNG world. Let's ignore the theoretically unreplicatable latinum from DS9.
An economic model with money breaks down pretty quickly in such a world. The only thing worth trading for money would be services. But nobody would be providing services you'd pay for, since they don't need to work to get money, since their replicator provides them with anything they need. If someone enjoyed performing the services you want, they would do it without payment. You'd also have problems finding a physical carrier of money. Each unit would need to be unique and easily verified as being original, but would also need to have some value to its uniqueness.
Such a world would also have nearly unlimited human freedom, since it is scarcity that most often prevents us from doing what we want. Personally I think such a world would self destruct very quickly. Someone would replicate a few dozen kilograms of antimatter in his ex-girlfriend's bedroom.
Scarce yet widely spread resources work best (gold, for example).
Supply is too scarce and industrial demand for gold are too variable for it to be a good currency any more. Even in the 1700s and 1800s inflation and deflation often hit 20% or more, which killed a lot of economic growth. Yes, that's inflation and deflation of a currency consisting primarily of gold coins. And the government wasn't capable of stopping it. You won't hear that from anyone claiming all of our economic woes are because we went off the gold standard. Inflation has generally been lower and more stable than it was on the gold standard, and deflation has been rare.
That doesn't mean it's not a good store of value (i.e. the price of gold won't drop to zero. It could drop 80%, though) or a hedge against high inflation. It just means that it isn't a good currency.
Exactly where did he suggest you stop believing in god? You could read his statement many ways. Maybe he thinks such belief is stupid. More likely he believes that such beliefs are harmful to humanity as a whole. I've certainly seen nothing that would convince me otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I think it would be a good idea to prohibit religion or perform forced deprogramming of the religious. If a cure for religion were available in pill form, I would try to make it widely available, but like any treatment for mental illness, it shouldn't be forced unless the believer is a danger to himself or to others.
And I don't know where you're living, but in this country I see a lot of believers that would force belief at gunpoint if they were allowed to do so. That would include about half of the House of Representatives.
Actually most of the accelerations when dodging would be OK, primarily because the most effective control surfaces (the elevons) will be most effective for accelerations perpendicular to them and that's the direction planes are built to accelerate in. My suggestion for dodging a missile would be to throttle to max and a an accelerating turn to put the incoming missile about 45 degrees above (our perspective) the nose. We'll use whatever non-stalling control inputs we need to keep it there. We can get a rough distance estimate by our rate of turn. Eventually we can't hold the incoming at a stable position any more and it's heading towards the nose (meaning the missile is leading us, rather than trailing. It has some smarts.), so we roll inverted and point the nose to the ground, stalling the wings in the process. Think Pugachev's Cobra upside down. Making a lot of drag is the fastest deceleration we can do. Fortunately we think fast enough to be in control of an unstable aircraft. Now we accelerate downward until the threat is moving away or we are in danger of not being able to avoid the ground.
Now, having survived, the AI should be wondering what the hell it was doing so high in the air. 18 inches above the highest obstacle in the projected flight path projected out 2 seconds is a much safer place to be.
OK, so I'm being a smart ass. But seriously, I think that eventually missile avoidance on AI drones will be good enough that there will be two types of missile attacks. 1) No time for the drone to recognize there was a threat. 2) Successful avoidance. I think it's going to be hard to make a Mach 2.5 missile maneuverable enough to take a subsonic aircraft capable of 20g turns and 30g braking maeuvers, if the launch comes from a significant distance.
Let's picture a different trial. I give 11 healthy volunteers two grams of sodium cyanide. And I give 11 others a placebo. All the cyanide group die. None of the others do. Nobody would be saying the result is inconclusive because of the small sample size
And that what initial studies like this are meant to do. They are meant to 1) Show that the vaccine won't kill or injure large numbers of people. (i.e. that there is not a negative response that might be significant for large samples (2 or more people in this study show the same negative response.) 2) Show that the hoped for response may be occurring. If you don't do #1, then a large study would be irresponsible. If you don't do #2, nobody is going to give you money for a larger study.
Once you've done #1 and #2, then you can move up to the 1000 person trial, which will allow you to determine how effective your vaccine is.
It's hard to imagine how stupid "industry analysis and execs" are, until you read something like this.
It's easy to uses google's algorithms and googles's database without their permission. To do so, go to google.com and type in a search. Anyone can create their own fake search engine using google.
When bing first debuted, its search results were so similar to googles, that I joked that bing just went to google for results. I guess I wasn't too far off. Maybe now it's just when bing doesn't have any results that it goes to google.
Wouldn't the purpose of the "sputnik moment" be to change the anti-science environment in this country.\? As such wouldn't it be better to judge its effect after the moment, rather than noting declines occurring before?
The relativistic interval is 0 along the light cone from the event.
The relativistic interval is not a time interval, so it is incorrect to say that the event happened recently, unless you're in a very special frame. (i.e. Traveling along with the light from the supernova directly from the supernova to the earth at very close to the speed of light). It would have been very difficult for you to post your message from that frame. Since you're in essentially the same frame as we are, the supernova happened 64 million years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not a real unix admin unless you've written a compiler in awk or emacs in sed.
The Fed has pumped several trillion dollars into the economy as direct purchases of the securities involved. I'm not sure where you are coming from in terms of the money charts, but this is from the direct intervention by the Fed into the markets.
Yes, I agree that the Fed pumped trillions of dollars into the economy. The reason they did that was to replace some of the trillions of dollars that had been destroyed. Those dollars were destroyed as surely as if they had been burned. And if the fed hadn't made new dollars to replace them, the collapse would have been far worse. But even with those trillions, there is less money in circulation now than there was in 2007. Until that changes there won't be broad spectrum inflationary pressures.
It is arcane because it requires an understanding of what money is. Money is created when banks lend it. It's destroyed when the value of the securing property bringing drops, the loan value with it. Since the bubble burst, banks have essentially stopped lending, so the only increase in the money supply is due to the Fed. And they've stopped lending because the repeal of Glass Stegall gave them more profitable and more dangerous things to do with our money. Why lend at 5% with a 3% chance of a loss, when you can earn 25% with a 15% chance of a loss? If they don't wise up, they're going to force us into having a Federal Bank that lends directly. Or they're going to bankrupt us again. In neither case would I want to be a banker.
Demand for consumer goods, especially food, has remained the same but the amount of money floating around has gone up.
That's just not true. The number of dollars that the Fed has pumped into the economy is tiny compared with the number of dollars that were destroyed when the bubble burst. Just look at an M3 chart, especially a long term one. The drop is astounding and unprecedented in recent history. It's the only drop in the money supply since 1970. Anyone who shows you a money supply chart that rises in that period is probably trying to sell you gold, and so they will hide the money that was destroyed by showing you something besides M3. Other than the gold sellers, the cries against "inflationary policies" are mainly coming from right wing politicians, many of whom were responsible in part for the policies that caused the bubble in first place. Their main goal is to use the current crisis to get the uneducated to blame the wrong party. They would love, and are working towards, worsening the crisis for next year's elections.
In case you missed it above... http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/sumprice.pdf
The US and other countries don't back their currency, which is why its value constantly decreases.
Not really on either count. Long term and to first order, the value of all currency in circulation is the value of the goods and services backing the loans that the money was created for. The value of the dollar constantly decreases because it is advantageous for the value to drop to encourage spending and/or productive investing. Therefore monetary policy is chosen such that a low level of constant inflation is targeted. Monetary policy could be changed to encourage deflation, but that would bring the economy to a screeching halt. Or we could encourage more inflation, but that encourages too much risky investing and hurts the creditors who are in charge of choosing our government.
The housing crisis was an example of what deflation is like. Housing values collapsed, making many mortgages worthless, which destroyed a vast amount of money. Banks became unwilling to lend money because it was much more valuable to them invested in securities than it was as a loan. I haven't quite understood explanations of why consumer prices weren't affected. Probably because most people already spend most of their money on necessities.
categorically false. a silver or gold dollar from 1789 to 1917 essentially had a constant value
You can call it "categorically false," but that just makes you someone who hasn't looked into it or a liar. I'll assume the former for now.
That the value was essentially the same in 1789 and 1917 doesn't mean that there were no cycles of inflation and deflation in between. Have a look at page 6 of this presentation. In it I see annual inflation of up to 20% and annual deflation of up to 19% in that time period. Then compare it to the relatively lower (absolute value) inflation after 1917.
Sorry if it doesn't match your preconceived notions of the superiority of gold as a currency.
Ay, Caramba!
Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Osama Bin Laden, and Sarah Palin combined.
We should all be glad that the video recordings from that party were deleted. Where is Trig these days, anyway?
Deflation is bad because it reduces the amount of BTC in effective circulation (i.e reduces spending of a currency because it will be worth more tomorrow). People will tend to hold BTC rather than spend, which means the people who accept BTC are more likely to stop accepting them. At the same time the merchants are more likely to hold the BTC they do get rather than selling them on an exchange. Since there will be fewer BTC on the exchange, the price will be driven up further.
Back when the US was using fully gold backed currency annual inflation and deflation were often extreme, and they were just as damaging then as now. There were times when there was 15% inflation one year followed by 15% deflation one or two years later.
And to contemplate eliminating human freedom and incentive would be demonic.
You only need to eliminate one of the two. Another name for "incentive" would be "scarcity" and eliminating it wouldn't be demonic.
For example, lets imagine two inventions. 1) A generator that provides unlimited free energy by turning matter into antimatter and annihilating it with matter. 2) A matter replicator that can replicate any material object. Essentially we're in the Star Trek-TNG world. Let's ignore the theoretically unreplicatable latinum from DS9.
An economic model with money breaks down pretty quickly in such a world. The only thing worth trading for money would be services. But nobody would be providing services you'd pay for, since they don't need to work to get money, since their replicator provides them with anything they need. If someone enjoyed performing the services you want, they would do it without payment. You'd also have problems finding a physical carrier of money. Each unit would need to be unique and easily verified as being original, but would also need to have some value to its uniqueness.
Such a world would also have nearly unlimited human freedom, since it is scarcity that most often prevents us from doing what we want. Personally I think such a world would self destruct very quickly. Someone would replicate a few dozen kilograms of antimatter in his ex-girlfriend's bedroom.
Scarce yet widely spread resources work best (gold, for example).
Supply is too scarce and industrial demand for gold are too variable for it to be a good currency any more. Even in the 1700s and 1800s inflation and deflation often hit 20% or more, which killed a lot of economic growth. Yes, that's inflation and deflation of a currency consisting primarily of gold coins. And the government wasn't capable of stopping it. You won't hear that from anyone claiming all of our economic woes are because we went off the gold standard. Inflation has generally been lower and more stable than it was on the gold standard, and deflation has been rare. That doesn't mean it's not a good store of value (i.e. the price of gold won't drop to zero. It could drop 80%, though) or a hedge against high inflation. It just means that it isn't a good currency.
Exactly where did he suggest you stop believing in god? You could read his statement many ways. Maybe he thinks such belief is stupid. More likely he believes that such beliefs are harmful to humanity as a whole. I've certainly seen nothing that would convince me otherwise. But that doesn't mean that I think it would be a good idea to prohibit religion or perform forced deprogramming of the religious. If a cure for religion were available in pill form, I would try to make it widely available, but like any treatment for mental illness, it shouldn't be forced unless the believer is a danger to himself or to others.
And I don't know where you're living, but in this country I see a lot of believers that would force belief at gunpoint if they were allowed to do so. That would include about half of the House of Representatives.
What about a burning bush?????
I think you're supposed to confess that to your gynecologist.
I thought Purgatory was no longer part of the dogma.
$180? For a linksys router? Seriously, if you're spending that much maybe you should look for a higher quality brand.
And when will that be? My ISP doesn't yet support IPv6, yet we're supposed to be worried that they'll drop IPv4 soon?
Actually most of the accelerations when dodging would be OK, primarily because the most effective control surfaces (the elevons) will be most effective for accelerations perpendicular to them and that's the direction planes are built to accelerate in. My suggestion for dodging a missile would be to throttle to max and a an accelerating turn to put the incoming missile about 45 degrees above (our perspective) the nose. We'll use whatever non-stalling control inputs we need to keep it there. We can get a rough distance estimate by our rate of turn. Eventually we can't hold the incoming at a stable position any more and it's heading towards the nose (meaning the missile is leading us, rather than trailing. It has some smarts.), so we roll inverted and point the nose to the ground, stalling the wings in the process. Think Pugachev's Cobra upside down. Making a lot of drag is the fastest deceleration we can do. Fortunately we think fast enough to be in control of an unstable aircraft. Now we accelerate downward until the threat is moving away or we are in danger of not being able to avoid the ground.
Now, having survived, the AI should be wondering what the hell it was doing so high in the air. 18 inches above the highest obstacle in the projected flight path projected out 2 seconds is a much safer place to be.
OK, so I'm being a smart ass. But seriously, I think that eventually missile avoidance on AI drones will be good enough that there will be two types of missile attacks. 1) No time for the drone to recognize there was a threat. 2) Successful avoidance. I think it's going to be hard to make a Mach 2.5 missile maneuverable enough to take a subsonic aircraft capable of 20g turns and 30g braking maeuvers, if the launch comes from a significant distance.
Let's picture a different trial. I give 11 healthy volunteers two grams of sodium cyanide. And I give 11 others a placebo. All the cyanide group die. None of the others do. Nobody would be saying the result is inconclusive because of the small sample size
And that what initial studies like this are meant to do. They are meant to 1) Show that the vaccine won't kill or injure large numbers of people. (i.e. that there is not a negative response that might be significant for large samples (2 or more people in this study show the same negative response.) 2) Show that the hoped for response may be occurring. If you don't do #1, then a large study would be irresponsible. If you don't do #2, nobody is going to give you money for a larger study.
Once you've done #1 and #2, then you can move up to the 1000 person trial, which will allow you to determine how effective your vaccine is.
Why would they need to replace the hose and nozzle? It's not like the driver wouldn't notice and bring it back to them.
It's hard to imagine how stupid "industry analysis and execs" are, until you read something like this.
It's easy to uses google's algorithms and googles's database without their permission. To do so, go to google.com and type in a search. Anyone can create their own fake search engine using google.
When bing first debuted, its search results were so similar to googles, that I joked that bing just went to google for results. I guess I wasn't too far off. Maybe now it's just when bing doesn't have any results that it goes to google.
Wouldn't the purpose of the "sputnik moment" be to change the anti-science environment in this country.\? As such wouldn't it be better to judge its effect after the moment, rather than noting declines occurring before?
The relativistic interval is 0 along the light cone from the event.
The relativistic interval is not a time interval, so it is incorrect to say that the event happened recently, unless you're in a very special frame. (i.e. Traveling along with the light from the supernova directly from the supernova to the earth at very close to the speed of light). It would have been very difficult for you to post your message from that frame. Since you're in essentially the same frame as we are, the supernova happened 64 million years ago.
Don't worry, Slashdot will report it again tomorrow.
It's spelled Felgercarb! Frakking spawn of a she-daggit!
And the gas station will charge you $200 for disconnecting the break-away device. I think it's a great money maker: another form of tax on stupidity.