Note that the laws are made in the most complicated and absurd ways on purpose. There is no money for lawyers where one person can interpret a law by herself.
The other thing is that people miss one of the main roles of lawyers - emotional therapy. It works because normally both parties to the dispute, (especially when it does not involve experienced business people who can see the bigger picture) are typically trying to find someone to be on their 'side'. A lawyer will happily take this role for you. They will listen to you moan about how mean or nasty the other party is, and colour the legal advice they give you so that you feel justified that your position is 'right'. They will then go 'into bat' for you against your opponent by talking to the other lawyer. I once had a business dispute where the other guy couldn't see this. After getting endless letters telling me how hurt his feelings were while dancing around the real issues that need to be resolved, I ended up having to tell the idiot that his lawyer really doesn't actually care about his plight, but is just pretending to care because he was being paid $200/hr to do so. I also explained to him that when his lawyer goes and has a petty argument with my one over some point that is not significant to the dispute, they don't actually have a shouting match down the phone. They are on the same team - which is team billable hours.
Anyway it ended up making him so paranoid I was able to scare him into a settlement. My point is that lawyers are not going to go away because very little of how they make money is from solving logical legal problems.
You actually bring up a pretty interesting point. Most legal arguments are not amazingly intelligent, they simply involve finding logic loopholes using obscure case law. Even legal strategies are reasonably well defined, with most litigators just working to a book in terms of the various ways you can attack a case if you can't win on merit. Given that it is largely a process of reviewing as much case law as possible to find arguments and then weighing probabilities of success against possible defence strategies, this is probably something an AI will be able to do quite well.
At that point we just get a crazy situation though, where companies would have AI lawyer offs. I guess it is no different from the stupidity that is high frequency trading. Anyway, what a wonderful future we have to look forward to.
It is way past time to end all patents.
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
I have ten before breakfast and at least one is great.
I invent things. I don't patent it, I implement.
Time to end all patents.
I agree with your sentiment, but saying we should end all patents is like asking for people to stop fighting wars. Just not going to happen. The problem with taking it as a position is that it is easy to attack. For example, there is a robust argument for why some pharmaceuticals need to have protections to make them economic to develop. If you go into a debate wanting to stop patents, the opposition just wheels out some kid who got cured from cancer due to a drug that cost billions to develop and your get made to look like a hater of sick children.
Sadly the patent system has been destroying technological progress for a long time now, and it is unlikely that will change in our lifetime. The best we can hope for is a few changes to push back against the growing lawyer fest. The easiest I could see to get implemented (though probably still impossible) is to have a graduated system for patent length. Something like 5-7 years should be the default under the standard application process, and if you want a longer term you have to go through a much more involved application that asks you to justify why you need longer monopoly rights to ensure you get an adequate return on your investments. This could include a review by an independent judicial panel that weights up the net benefit to society from giving you a longer patent term and makes the decision based on that. The goal of the system would then be to protect the incentive to innovate, not to give people arbitrary monopoly rights (why is 20 years correct for all patents?). I find America's embrace of the latter (which is basically what the current system does) quite bizarre given that it is the antithesis of free markets.
Most likely not.
The CPU/GPU is not the bottleneck anymore. The screen and wireless consume more power. The sad truth is, everything else has advanced, but battery technology is still in the last decade.
This is very true. However, the battery doesn't need to be the bottleneck for significant improvements. At the moment much of the energy is wasted in the screen backlight on LCD devices, and as more displays move towards new technologies like quantum dot or AMOLED this will be reduced significantly. On the wireless side it is a bit harder to get gains, but as smaller mobile cells gets built out this will allow for a reduction in power in the situations most people use their phones.
With these developments it is not improbable for us to move towards phones with half the battery size (or twice the battery life) of current products without needing any sort of big leap in battery technology. Given that there is still scope for the main board/sim card/audio jack to shrink, I don't see any reason why our current technology trajectory won't allow us to have 4-5mm thick iPhone in a couple of years. Whether having phones this thin is actually useful is a different question of course.
Bad, China holds a lot of sovereign US debt. Think Iceland, and you'll get the idea.
And if the Chinese sell those bonds what exactly are they going to do with the stacks of USD they will get paid for them? Ship them back to China in bales and use them for heating?
That's why running a mercantilist strategy in exchange for fiat currency is a pretty stupid thing to do, and why the USA has happily let them indulge. Japan did the same thing and is similarly now trapped with a US bond debt that it can't do anything useful with.
Yes Skylon is quite exciting, but really still very far away from anything that can fly into orbit. The company seems to be focusing on addressing the unknowns in the engine technology, not even getting a complete engine going at this stage. If they get to the point where a complete engine looks viable I imagine as established aerospace company like Airbus or Boeing will take over from there.
UK is very good at early stage tech, but has always struggled with scaling up. The engineering sector never really recovered from the destruction of the Thatcher era. Engineers are still seen as a hang over from the victorian age, so the best go into finance or leave the country. Sad for a country that produces such good ones.
USA has its own version of what is Greece experiencing right now, that's what 'debt ceiling' is. Many believe that USA can simply print bonds and sell them and get out of jail free, however this only works as long as somebody buys those bonds and the bond market is the biggest bubble of all. USA will have its own currency crisis and bonds are currency promised into the future, so that will also collapse.
That is what the austerians want you to believe. The reality is that the USA will never have trouble 'selling' its bonds, because the federal reserve just buys them if nobody else will or it wants to drive down interest rates. This is precisely how the fed controls interest rates normally, and is the basis for quantitative easing. There is no possibility of the USA having a problem with its bonds because it can keep printing money until the economy takes off (at which point it would just create inflation).
The reason the austerians promote this message though, is that none of this comes for free. All this extra money will either cause an asset price bubble, which will wipe out all the savers money, or if that doesn't happen, massive inflation when the economy picks up. Either way savers are going to be paying for all that govt deficit spending in a macroeconomic rebalancing.
And that is what this conflict is about. Essentially the fed, ECB, BoE are saying to savers go and spend your money, stop hoarding it. But savers are not listening so aggregate demand is still broken. The debate now is whether the govt just goes and starts spending their money through QE funded deficits until they get the message, or just puts its hands up in exasperation and leaves things to stagnate for 20 years like in Japan. Obviously what you think is the right answer depends on whether you are a saver or borrower, though there is a clear best answer for the economy in general.
Perhaps, but making Greek euro notes non-legal tender would be a practical expulsion of the country from the eurozone, which may actually be what Syriza wants them to do. Draining 100 billion euros out of the ELA mechanism so that Greek retail deposits are secured, defaulting on the IMF loan repayments, and framing things so that Greece is the one getting kicked out by a nasty democracy hating EU would be a better way to exit than leaving in a huff. It would also solve Syriza's problem of not having a popular mandate to grexit, and rather oddly mean they wouldn't even have to deal with the practicalities of introducing their own currency - fixing the paper currency mess would be the EU's problem.
I see Greece is now challenging the ECB's legal right to cut of the ELA funding, and the ECB is saying the ATMs will run out of money within 5days. The issue of hard currency is definitely becoming the pressure point. Crazy times.
I think the trouble most geeks have with management is that in the end it is just varying degrees of bullying. Yes, there are visionary people who can lead by inspiring others, but these are extremely rare and most companies have a mild to severe bullying culture in their management. The trouble is that bullying works very well on many people, and is easy for unskilled people to do, so it survives. I think that until you accept this and start learning how to deal with it you will always find management hard.
The key thing to remember is there are roughly three types of bullies:
- Those who only do it only when required. These people are fine and sadly you need to learn how they do this too if you want to be an effective manager. The reality is that sometimes you just have to bully people a bit for their own good. This is totally not PC, but until you have tried to deal 'nicely' with someone difficult and been totally burnt as the problem balloons out of control, you'll probably not understand. A small amount of bullying on certain types of people at the start of a potential problem can save everyone from a big mess.
- Narcissistic bullies. These are in my experience the most common (and all too common). Basically they are almost always reasonably skilled people with a massive inferiority complex in a particular area. This has created a personality defect which manifests itself as a giant ego on the one hand, and an aggressive defence mechanism on the other if they ever feel under threat. They will attempt to destroy you if you trigger the defence mechanism, even if you don't realise you have done so (this catches lots of people out). The key thing to remember with these people is that the narcissistic response is automatic. It is like buying drinks from a vending machine, and they can't control it. Once you figure out how they tick you can manage them by selecting what you want from the vending machine to suit your needs. This sounds nasty and controlling but the reality is that if you try to 'fix' their narcissism with logic you will just end up in a giant fight you don't want to be involved in and from which nobody will win. Figure out their triggers and then work around them, and as soon as you can, avoid working with them at all.
- Sociopathic bullies. Okay these guys are the cream of the bullying crop. Unlike the narcissists who's character flaw is automatic, sociopaths are in many ways super-humans, because they lack humanity. The narcissistic will bully you out of irrational fear (which you can use to your advantage), while the sociopath will calmly bully you because he has meticulously analysed you to figure out how best you can be controlled. The reality is these guys are quite prevalent at the top of the food chain, but are not so common in general, so hopefully you will never have to deal with one. If you do, then your options really are to just ensure that their goals align with yours. You can rationalise with them and if you can both win from a situation then a useful partnership can be struck. But you must never try to challenge these people or they will destroy you. Honestly you cannot beat these people if you have to work with them. Even if you are smarter than they are, they will just drag the conflict down until it is a race to the darkest corners of humanity, because they will know they can go to places your emotions/morality won't allow you. I repeat you cannot beat these people. If you really want to take them on the only way is to have a very good game plan and jump ship to another company where you can attack their goals from the outside.
This all sounds very negative, but remember that there are a lot of great people out there. They want good bosses, but the trouble is that if all the good people who could be their managers shy away because they can't deal with the bullies, then the bullies take over. If you feel you can contribute in management then do it, but just realise it is a jungle with some crazy animals the further up you get. The key to doing well is to put the same sort of effort into understand these people as you would into learning a new framework. Even better find a company with good managers (even if it means a big pay cut) and learn from those people before jumping back into the fire.
For real? I don't think they would dare do something like printing out 300 billions and sending them to creditors in big bales. Would be awesome if they actually did it, and added "for the lulz" on the 100 bill wrapper.
They definitely have the equipment, but as to what arrangements the ECB has to control consumables etc. I don't know. I doubt they would print on such a grand scale though, but printing enough bills to keep the ATM machines going so they can continue to defy the EU through summer? Why not? Once they've defaulted it is not like they have some kind of precedent to uphold. For all we know they may have stocked up a bit over the last few months in anticipation of the ECB finally turning of the taps. If the ECB won't credit their ELA account and they have the paper it is only themselves holding things back.
It would be an interesting play if they could pull it off. Let the painful pictures of greek pensioners queueing for the ATMs hit the TV screens for a couple more days, then announce they are going to save the people from this terrible fate by defying the evil EU. What does the EU do then? Boots on the ground in Athens? It really throws the ball back into their court.
Still this is total speculation on my part. I'm sure the reality will be much more ridiculous.
Interestingly, the National Bank of Greece is one of the eurozone institutions that has the facilities to print Euro bank notes.
Since November they have printed more than 13 billion euros of bank notes (against ELA funds) which Greeks are now storing under their mattresses.
One wonders what sorts of contingency the EU has for this. It would be the ultimate middle finger to the EU if Syriza decided to solve the ECB imposed liquidity crunch by literally firing up the printing presses, yet a uniquely convenient thing to do when stuck in a currency union. Normally, the ECB could punish them by cutting of access to the TARGET2 settlement system, but this is basically already the situation now with the ELA funds running dry and capital controls in place.
Awesome. Now they just need to sort out the southern cross cable monopoly that works like a geo-blocker for the entire country when everyone tries to get on youtube at the same time after work.
I agree. I think many people conflate the problems of poor tenancy rights with renting as an political problem. I have spent most of my life renting in areas it would not have made economic sense for me to buy in, from landlords who on the most part are pretty good. They fix stuff for me and at this point in my life being locked into owning a home would be a personal disadvantage. But I also realise that many people get exploited by a landlord or have one that does not fix problems in their property etc. Suggesting that because of some bad landlord behaviour everyone should own their own property is a bit of a brutal solution.
Also note that the next step for the UK housing market is that the Bank of England locks down cash hoarding. In a deflationary market it is better to take your money out as printed bills since deflation will worsen a bank's solvency position and put your deposits at risk (oh bank guarantee you say, ever heard of negative interest rates?). Interestingly the new anti-money laundering laws set the framework for them to do this quite easily - you are almost prohibited from making large cash withdrawals already because you might be funding the terrorists. Switzerland has also banned storing cash in safe deposit boxes.
The BoE will need to be able to enforce negative interest rates so that people spend their money rather than perpetuate a deflationary spiral and to do this it will need to try to lock people's deposits into the banking system. I suspect this will cause more people to pile into the housing market in an attempt to reduce their cash holdings, which actually just further inflates the bubble, since your cash for a house becomes someone else's cash they want to get rid off.
The whole system is broken and the BoE is playing a game of wack-a-mole in an attempt to force people to use their savings to stimulate the economy. But the massive hole that is the property market is preventing them from doing this and so we see all the pressure escaping into it.
Anyway this will buy us a few more years of increases but what happens after that is anyone's guess.
Absolutely agree. Another piece of the puzzle is that you can fix the problem of 'no more land being made' by building better transport infrastructure. Apart from a few places (Hong Kong, Singapore) there is plenty of land, it is just not well connected to the jobs and services people require. Fortunately we have the technology to solve these sorts of problems and have been doing so quite effectively ever since cities grew beyond an area you could comfortably walk around.
Unfortunately most governments are very bad at building this sort of infrastructure now and it is not clear how you could set up an effective competitive market for such a strategic resource. Personally I think electric driverless car technology will have a big effect on the property market by opening up more land supply that is presently not well connected. But while it's great that the market will eventually triumph, it would just be simpler for everyone if we could get some competent people in to run the public services like the Germans seem to be able to do (and yes I know Germans bemoan their train system but really it is pretty amazing compared to most places).
And what happens to the property when they 'take if off the rental market and sell it instead'? They just stick it in a box in their garage?
If the property remains occupied by someone then there is no effect on the actual ability of the house to provide shelter to people in the area (you know, what we used houses for before they became an investment). All you have done is removed an investor from the market which will give tenants a better chance of outbidding investment buyers for properties, or bring in an investor with more realistic rental expectations.
Society does not benefit from ever increasing property prices relative to incomes. The present situation is nothing more than collective madness.
I agree with you in principle, however during the Great Depression this was largely what happened and things did not turn out well. Clearly there are a lot of differences between the economy then and now so it is hard to make inferences, but I think the Fed and Treasury were simply not prepared to take the risk. Remember they did let Lehman fail, and that almost destroyed the global financial system but for a massive government intervention program.
I suspect that if the govt had let these companies collapse, but then worked very quickly to sure up the real economy and protect middle class real wealth we could have had a painful but short hit that would have sorted the problem out. But I just don't think the sort of decisiveness required to make that work would be possible in such a large diverse democracy as the USA.
What we should have had was the regular mild recessions that characterised capitalism until Greenspan and Brown 'eliminated boom and bust' by propping up bad assets each time a recession threatened. Now we have the mother of all asset bubbles in the property market and I don't think the central banks have any idea how to fix the problem.
Recycling is just a manifestation of the sorts of externalities that fundamentally flaw many economic systems. For example, I find it intriguing that in London people go buy a plastic packaged sandwich that is relatively tasteless for lunch, while a comparatively poor person in Vietnam or Malaysia goes to a local shop and buys an incredibly tasty freshly made noodle bowl for about a tenth of the price.
Which of those people is really wealthier? Sure one has fiat currency wealth, but the other arguably enjoys (food wise anyway) a better quality of life.
This is the insanity of measuring the well-being of your citizens by how much fiat currency they are accumulating. It is even crazier because we now have a huge section of the economy (the financial industry) that is effectively just creating fiat currency - i.e. no real wealth. This is no surprise if you have a system that is ambivalent to whether GDP growth is coming from breaking windows and fixing them or creating a new treatment for cancer.
Personally I just think this is because free market economics and the blind pursuit of GDP growth are attractive to lazy politicians. They don't have to think about real social issues, come up with plans to deal with them, and then be held responsible for whether they succeed. They can just go, 'hey the market does what the market does', and leave it to their banking buddies to create asset bubbles in the housing market if they can't get any GDP growth in the real economy.
It will be a hard problem to change the way we measure economic success in both the minds of government and society, but if we don't eventually we will just see our real wealth bleed away until fiat currency becomes as worthless as its intrinsic value would suggest.
I haven't checked the standard in detail, but I imagine an ES6 to ES5 compiler will come out pretty quickly. Even if this only supports the core features to start with people will be able to start migrating towards ES6 code as soon as that happens. Most of the benefits appear to be in program structure rather than performance, so native platform support isn't actually that important.
Having recently visiting Japan I find these unskilled human replacement robots quite intriguing. Despite the fact that Japan has terrible demographics resulting in a growing shortage of workers, they have a huge number people doing quite pointless jobs such as the ubiquitous greeter in almost every store, teams of traffic controllers outside construction sites, and more staff at a regional train station than you would find at Oxford Circus during rush hour.
I discussed this with a Japanese person who commented that there is a shortage of work for unskilled workers, so they basically make up these jobs so that everyone can be employed. The real worker shortage, as everywhere in the world, is among the skilled and highly skilled and even Japan cannot create enough of these workers through its education system.
That is ultimately the problem I have with how these robots fit into our existing economic system. They are not replacing the skilled jobs that we are desperately short of (which is pushing skilled salaries up) and are simply competing with people who really can't do much else (which will push their salaries down to the marginal cost of a robot - which will be very bad for them once robots can make robots). Now in Japan they have the sort of weird social structure to support made up jobs rather than put people out on the street, but sadly I don't think the same will apply to western workers.
For us tech workers things will be very good, but having come from a working class background it really troubles me what is going on. The reality is that robotics should mean more prosperity for everyone, but if we stuff it up we will likely just end up with the same class based society that strangled growth in the world for centuries before the oppressed workers of the world ran away to the USA. Unfortunately we've run out of new continents to escape to so we'll have to fix this one among ourselves. I hope tech people start thinking about this stuff. We sadly have a long heritage of creating amazing stuff and then letting a bunch of narcissist use what we've done to feed their own greed. But hey, as long as we have a foosball table in the office right?
And one of the main reasons they developed Chrome (though the standard compliance thing was a big one too).
You can see why Google had to shaft Apple and push Android though. Imagine the situation they would be in now if Apple dominated all mobile and they were dependent on their 'generosity' to allow advertising and services through.
However I doubt they are doing this so they can switch off the tap to Google. It won't destroy Google or make Apple much extra money, but will absolutely spark of the thermo-nuclear war Jobs was so keen for. There would probably be enough lawyering to pull global GDP out of its present malaise if they did that.
I agree with all your points, but the big thing Apple has is that they will effectively be pushing this service to every iOS user, and after the free subscription period it is a simple 'buy' click and you're signed up. I think the lack of friction is going to get them a lot of customers very quickly.
As to whether they can compete on Android that will be very interesting. I think it will be hard for them as Android people (speaking anecdotally) can be quite polarised against Apple. This is probably the main reason they are doing the radio station stuff and poaching the top DJs. I'm not sure about that strategy though, we will probably have to wait for the first couple of Apple Watch results to see whether this post Jobs technique of buying coolness is going to work.
I imagine Spotify figure that if they do a surge now and try to match or beat Apple on ancillary services they may very well be able to keep them off Android. Anyway, hopefully the consumer wins out of all this and both companies up their game.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that the laws are made in the most complicated and absurd ways on purpose . There is no money for lawyers where one person can interpret a law by herself.
The other thing is that people miss one of the main roles of lawyers - emotional therapy. It works because normally both parties to the dispute, (especially when it does not involve experienced business people who can see the bigger picture) are typically trying to find someone to be on their 'side'. A lawyer will happily take this role for you. They will listen to you moan about how mean or nasty the other party is, and colour the legal advice they give you so that you feel justified that your position is 'right'. They will then go 'into bat' for you against your opponent by talking to the other lawyer. I once had a business dispute where the other guy couldn't see this. After getting endless letters telling me how hurt his feelings were while dancing around the real issues that need to be resolved, I ended up having to tell the idiot that his lawyer really doesn't actually care about his plight, but is just pretending to care because he was being paid $200/hr to do so. I also explained to him that when his lawyer goes and has a petty argument with my one over some point that is not significant to the dispute, they don't actually have a shouting match down the phone. They are on the same team - which is team billable hours.
Anyway it ended up making him so paranoid I was able to scare him into a settlement. My point is that lawyers are not going to go away because very little of how they make money is from solving logical legal problems.
You actually bring up a pretty interesting point. Most legal arguments are not amazingly intelligent, they simply involve finding logic loopholes using obscure case law. Even legal strategies are reasonably well defined, with most litigators just working to a book in terms of the various ways you can attack a case if you can't win on merit. Given that it is largely a process of reviewing as much case law as possible to find arguments and then weighing probabilities of success against possible defence strategies, this is probably something an AI will be able to do quite well.
At that point we just get a crazy situation though, where companies would have AI lawyer offs. I guess it is no different from the stupidity that is high frequency trading. Anyway, what a wonderful future we have to look forward to.
It is way past time to end all patents. Ideas are a dime a dozen. I have ten before breakfast and at least one is great. I invent things. I don't patent it, I implement. Time to end all patents.
I agree with your sentiment, but saying we should end all patents is like asking for people to stop fighting wars. Just not going to happen. The problem with taking it as a position is that it is easy to attack. For example, there is a robust argument for why some pharmaceuticals need to have protections to make them economic to develop. If you go into a debate wanting to stop patents, the opposition just wheels out some kid who got cured from cancer due to a drug that cost billions to develop and your get made to look like a hater of sick children.
Sadly the patent system has been destroying technological progress for a long time now, and it is unlikely that will change in our lifetime. The best we can hope for is a few changes to push back against the growing lawyer fest. The easiest I could see to get implemented (though probably still impossible) is to have a graduated system for patent length. Something like 5-7 years should be the default under the standard application process, and if you want a longer term you have to go through a much more involved application that asks you to justify why you need longer monopoly rights to ensure you get an adequate return on your investments. This could include a review by an independent judicial panel that weights up the net benefit to society from giving you a longer patent term and makes the decision based on that. The goal of the system would then be to protect the incentive to innovate, not to give people arbitrary monopoly rights (why is 20 years correct for all patents?). I find America's embrace of the latter (which is basically what the current system does) quite bizarre given that it is the antithesis of free markets.
Most likely not. The CPU/GPU is not the bottleneck anymore. The screen and wireless consume more power. The sad truth is, everything else has advanced, but battery technology is still in the last decade.
This is very true. However, the battery doesn't need to be the bottleneck for significant improvements. At the moment much of the energy is wasted in the screen backlight on LCD devices, and as more displays move towards new technologies like quantum dot or AMOLED this will be reduced significantly. On the wireless side it is a bit harder to get gains, but as smaller mobile cells gets built out this will allow for a reduction in power in the situations most people use their phones.
With these developments it is not improbable for us to move towards phones with half the battery size (or twice the battery life) of current products without needing any sort of big leap in battery technology. Given that there is still scope for the main board/sim card/audio jack to shrink, I don't see any reason why our current technology trajectory won't allow us to have 4-5mm thick iPhone in a couple of years. Whether having phones this thin is actually useful is a different question of course.
Bad, China holds a lot of sovereign US debt. Think Iceland, and you'll get the idea.
And if the Chinese sell those bonds what exactly are they going to do with the stacks of USD they will get paid for them? Ship them back to China in bales and use them for heating?
That's why running a mercantilist strategy in exchange for fiat currency is a pretty stupid thing to do, and why the USA has happily let them indulge. Japan did the same thing and is similarly now trapped with a US bond debt that it can't do anything useful with.
Socialism only works for people, while people are willing to work for socialism.
On the other hand capitalism is eating the earth. So perhaps space is the answer after all.
Yes Skylon is quite exciting, but really still very far away from anything that can fly into orbit. The company seems to be focusing on addressing the unknowns in the engine technology, not even getting a complete engine going at this stage. If they get to the point where a complete engine looks viable I imagine as established aerospace company like Airbus or Boeing will take over from there.
UK is very good at early stage tech, but has always struggled with scaling up. The engineering sector never really recovered from the destruction of the Thatcher era. Engineers are still seen as a hang over from the victorian age, so the best go into finance or leave the country. Sad for a country that produces such good ones.
It worked for Australia!
Until you sent Tony Abott.
USA has its own version of what is Greece experiencing right now, that's what 'debt ceiling' is. Many believe that USA can simply print bonds and sell them and get out of jail free, however this only works as long as somebody buys those bonds and the bond market is the biggest bubble of all. USA will have its own currency crisis and bonds are currency promised into the future, so that will also collapse.
That is what the austerians want you to believe. The reality is that the USA will never have trouble 'selling' its bonds, because the federal reserve just buys them if nobody else will or it wants to drive down interest rates. This is precisely how the fed controls interest rates normally, and is the basis for quantitative easing. There is no possibility of the USA having a problem with its bonds because it can keep printing money until the economy takes off (at which point it would just create inflation).
The reason the austerians promote this message though, is that none of this comes for free. All this extra money will either cause an asset price bubble, which will wipe out all the savers money, or if that doesn't happen, massive inflation when the economy picks up. Either way savers are going to be paying for all that govt deficit spending in a macroeconomic rebalancing.
And that is what this conflict is about. Essentially the fed, ECB, BoE are saying to savers go and spend your money, stop hoarding it. But savers are not listening so aggregate demand is still broken. The debate now is whether the govt just goes and starts spending their money through QE funded deficits until they get the message, or just puts its hands up in exasperation and leaves things to stagnate for 20 years like in Japan. Obviously what you think is the right answer depends on whether you are a saver or borrower, though there is a clear best answer for the economy in general.
Perhaps, but making Greek euro notes non-legal tender would be a practical expulsion of the country from the eurozone, which may actually be what Syriza wants them to do. Draining 100 billion euros out of the ELA mechanism so that Greek retail deposits are secured, defaulting on the IMF loan repayments, and framing things so that Greece is the one getting kicked out by a nasty democracy hating EU would be a better way to exit than leaving in a huff. It would also solve Syriza's problem of not having a popular mandate to grexit, and rather oddly mean they wouldn't even have to deal with the practicalities of introducing their own currency - fixing the paper currency mess would be the EU's problem.
I see Greece is now challenging the ECB's legal right to cut of the ELA funding, and the ECB is saying the ATMs will run out of money within 5days. The issue of hard currency is definitely becoming the pressure point. Crazy times.
I think the trouble most geeks have with management is that in the end it is just varying degrees of bullying. Yes, there are visionary people who can lead by inspiring others, but these are extremely rare and most companies have a mild to severe bullying culture in their management. The trouble is that bullying works very well on many people, and is easy for unskilled people to do, so it survives. I think that until you accept this and start learning how to deal with it you will always find management hard.
The key thing to remember is there are roughly three types of bullies:
- Those who only do it only when required. These people are fine and sadly you need to learn how they do this too if you want to be an effective manager. The reality is that sometimes you just have to bully people a bit for their own good. This is totally not PC, but until you have tried to deal 'nicely' with someone difficult and been totally burnt as the problem balloons out of control, you'll probably not understand. A small amount of bullying on certain types of people at the start of a potential problem can save everyone from a big mess.
- Narcissistic bullies. These are in my experience the most common (and all too common). Basically they are almost always reasonably skilled people with a massive inferiority complex in a particular area. This has created a personality defect which manifests itself as a giant ego on the one hand, and an aggressive defence mechanism on the other if they ever feel under threat. They will attempt to destroy you if you trigger the defence mechanism, even if you don't realise you have done so (this catches lots of people out). The key thing to remember with these people is that the narcissistic response is automatic. It is like buying drinks from a vending machine, and they can't control it. Once you figure out how they tick you can manage them by selecting what you want from the vending machine to suit your needs. This sounds nasty and controlling but the reality is that if you try to 'fix' their narcissism with logic you will just end up in a giant fight you don't want to be involved in and from which nobody will win. Figure out their triggers and then work around them, and as soon as you can, avoid working with them at all.
- Sociopathic bullies. Okay these guys are the cream of the bullying crop. Unlike the narcissists who's character flaw is automatic, sociopaths are in many ways super-humans, because they lack humanity. The narcissistic will bully you out of irrational fear (which you can use to your advantage), while the sociopath will calmly bully you because he has meticulously analysed you to figure out how best you can be controlled. The reality is these guys are quite prevalent at the top of the food chain, but are not so common in general, so hopefully you will never have to deal with one. If you do, then your options really are to just ensure that their goals align with yours. You can rationalise with them and if you can both win from a situation then a useful partnership can be struck. But you must never try to challenge these people or they will destroy you. Honestly you cannot beat these people if you have to work with them. Even if you are smarter than they are, they will just drag the conflict down until it is a race to the darkest corners of humanity, because they will know they can go to places your emotions/morality won't allow you. I repeat you cannot beat these people. If you really want to take them on the only way is to have a very good game plan and jump ship to another company where you can attack their goals from the outside.
This all sounds very negative, but remember that there are a lot of great people out there. They want good bosses, but the trouble is that if all the good people who could be their managers shy away because they can't deal with the bullies, then the bullies take over. If you feel you can contribute in management then do it, but just realise it is a jungle with some crazy animals the further up you get. The key to doing well is to put the same sort of effort into understand these people as you would into learning a new framework. Even better find a company with good managers (even if it means a big pay cut) and learn from those people before jumping back into the fire.
For real? I don't think they would dare do something like printing out 300 billions and sending them to creditors in big bales. Would be awesome if they actually did it, and added "for the lulz" on the 100 bill wrapper.
They definitely have the equipment, but as to what arrangements the ECB has to control consumables etc. I don't know. I doubt they would print on such a grand scale though, but printing enough bills to keep the ATM machines going so they can continue to defy the EU through summer? Why not? Once they've defaulted it is not like they have some kind of precedent to uphold. For all we know they may have stocked up a bit over the last few months in anticipation of the ECB finally turning of the taps. If the ECB won't credit their ELA account and they have the paper it is only themselves holding things back.
It would be an interesting play if they could pull it off. Let the painful pictures of greek pensioners queueing for the ATMs hit the TV screens for a couple more days, then announce they are going to save the people from this terrible fate by defying the evil EU. What does the EU do then? Boots on the ground in Athens? It really throws the ball back into their court.
Still this is total speculation on my part. I'm sure the reality will be much more ridiculous.
Interestingly, the National Bank of Greece is one of the eurozone institutions that has the facilities to print Euro bank notes.
Since November they have printed more than 13 billion euros of bank notes (against ELA funds) which Greeks are now storing under their mattresses.
One wonders what sorts of contingency the EU has for this. It would be the ultimate middle finger to the EU if Syriza decided to solve the ECB imposed liquidity crunch by literally firing up the printing presses, yet a uniquely convenient thing to do when stuck in a currency union. Normally, the ECB could punish them by cutting of access to the TARGET2 settlement system, but this is basically already the situation now with the ELA funds running dry and capital controls in place.
What a circus this could become.
Awesome. Now they just need to sort out the southern cross cable monopoly that works like a geo-blocker for the entire country when everyone tries to get on youtube at the same time after work.
I agree. I think many people conflate the problems of poor tenancy rights with renting as an political problem. I have spent most of my life renting in areas it would not have made economic sense for me to buy in, from landlords who on the most part are pretty good. They fix stuff for me and at this point in my life being locked into owning a home would be a personal disadvantage. But I also realise that many people get exploited by a landlord or have one that does not fix problems in their property etc. Suggesting that because of some bad landlord behaviour everyone should own their own property is a bit of a brutal solution.
Also note that the next step for the UK housing market is that the Bank of England locks down cash hoarding. In a deflationary market it is better to take your money out as printed bills since deflation will worsen a bank's solvency position and put your deposits at risk (oh bank guarantee you say, ever heard of negative interest rates?). Interestingly the new anti-money laundering laws set the framework for them to do this quite easily - you are almost prohibited from making large cash withdrawals already because you might be funding the terrorists. Switzerland has also banned storing cash in safe deposit boxes.
The BoE will need to be able to enforce negative interest rates so that people spend their money rather than perpetuate a deflationary spiral and to do this it will need to try to lock people's deposits into the banking system. I suspect this will cause more people to pile into the housing market in an attempt to reduce their cash holdings, which actually just further inflates the bubble, since your cash for a house becomes someone else's cash they want to get rid off.
The whole system is broken and the BoE is playing a game of wack-a-mole in an attempt to force people to use their savings to stimulate the economy. But the massive hole that is the property market is preventing them from doing this and so we see all the pressure escaping into it.
Anyway this will buy us a few more years of increases but what happens after that is anyone's guess.
Absolutely agree. Another piece of the puzzle is that you can fix the problem of 'no more land being made' by building better transport infrastructure. Apart from a few places (Hong Kong, Singapore) there is plenty of land, it is just not well connected to the jobs and services people require. Fortunately we have the technology to solve these sorts of problems and have been doing so quite effectively ever since cities grew beyond an area you could comfortably walk around.
Unfortunately most governments are very bad at building this sort of infrastructure now and it is not clear how you could set up an effective competitive market for such a strategic resource. Personally I think electric driverless car technology will have a big effect on the property market by opening up more land supply that is presently not well connected. But while it's great that the market will eventually triumph, it would just be simpler for everyone if we could get some competent people in to run the public services like the Germans seem to be able to do (and yes I know Germans bemoan their train system but really it is pretty amazing compared to most places).
And what happens to the property when they 'take if off the rental market and sell it instead'? They just stick it in a box in their garage?
If the property remains occupied by someone then there is no effect on the actual ability of the house to provide shelter to people in the area (you know, what we used houses for before they became an investment). All you have done is removed an investor from the market which will give tenants a better chance of outbidding investment buyers for properties, or bring in an investor with more realistic rental expectations.
Society does not benefit from ever increasing property prices relative to incomes. The present situation is nothing more than collective madness.
I agree with you in principle, however during the Great Depression this was largely what happened and things did not turn out well. Clearly there are a lot of differences between the economy then and now so it is hard to make inferences, but I think the Fed and Treasury were simply not prepared to take the risk. Remember they did let Lehman fail, and that almost destroyed the global financial system but for a massive government intervention program.
I suspect that if the govt had let these companies collapse, but then worked very quickly to sure up the real economy and protect middle class real wealth we could have had a painful but short hit that would have sorted the problem out. But I just don't think the sort of decisiveness required to make that work would be possible in such a large diverse democracy as the USA.
What we should have had was the regular mild recessions that characterised capitalism until Greenspan and Brown 'eliminated boom and bust' by propping up bad assets each time a recession threatened. Now we have the mother of all asset bubbles in the property market and I don't think the central banks have any idea how to fix the problem.
Recycling is just a manifestation of the sorts of externalities that fundamentally flaw many economic systems. For example, I find it intriguing that in London people go buy a plastic packaged sandwich that is relatively tasteless for lunch, while a comparatively poor person in Vietnam or Malaysia goes to a local shop and buys an incredibly tasty freshly made noodle bowl for about a tenth of the price.
Which of those people is really wealthier? Sure one has fiat currency wealth, but the other arguably enjoys (food wise anyway) a better quality of life.
This is the insanity of measuring the well-being of your citizens by how much fiat currency they are accumulating. It is even crazier because we now have a huge section of the economy (the financial industry) that is effectively just creating fiat currency - i.e. no real wealth. This is no surprise if you have a system that is ambivalent to whether GDP growth is coming from breaking windows and fixing them or creating a new treatment for cancer.
Personally I just think this is because free market economics and the blind pursuit of GDP growth are attractive to lazy politicians. They don't have to think about real social issues, come up with plans to deal with them, and then be held responsible for whether they succeed. They can just go, 'hey the market does what the market does', and leave it to their banking buddies to create asset bubbles in the housing market if they can't get any GDP growth in the real economy.
It will be a hard problem to change the way we measure economic success in both the minds of government and society, but if we don't eventually we will just see our real wealth bleed away until fiat currency becomes as worthless as its intrinsic value would suggest.
I haven't checked the standard in detail, but I imagine an ES6 to ES5 compiler will come out pretty quickly. Even if this only supports the core features to start with people will be able to start migrating towards ES6 code as soon as that happens. Most of the benefits appear to be in program structure rather than performance, so native platform support isn't actually that important.
Having recently visiting Japan I find these unskilled human replacement robots quite intriguing. Despite the fact that Japan has terrible demographics resulting in a growing shortage of workers, they have a huge number people doing quite pointless jobs such as the ubiquitous greeter in almost every store, teams of traffic controllers outside construction sites, and more staff at a regional train station than you would find at Oxford Circus during rush hour.
I discussed this with a Japanese person who commented that there is a shortage of work for unskilled workers, so they basically make up these jobs so that everyone can be employed. The real worker shortage, as everywhere in the world, is among the skilled and highly skilled and even Japan cannot create enough of these workers through its education system.
That is ultimately the problem I have with how these robots fit into our existing economic system. They are not replacing the skilled jobs that we are desperately short of (which is pushing skilled salaries up) and are simply competing with people who really can't do much else (which will push their salaries down to the marginal cost of a robot - which will be very bad for them once robots can make robots). Now in Japan they have the sort of weird social structure to support made up jobs rather than put people out on the street, but sadly I don't think the same will apply to western workers.
For us tech workers things will be very good, but having come from a working class background it really troubles me what is going on. The reality is that robotics should mean more prosperity for everyone, but if we stuff it up we will likely just end up with the same class based society that strangled growth in the world for centuries before the oppressed workers of the world ran away to the USA. Unfortunately we've run out of new continents to escape to so we'll have to fix this one among ourselves. I hope tech people start thinking about this stuff. We sadly have a long heritage of creating amazing stuff and then letting a bunch of narcissist use what we've done to feed their own greed. But hey, as long as we have a foosball table in the office right?
Posting to undo mod stuff up.
And one of the main reasons they developed Chrome (though the standard compliance thing was a big one too).
You can see why Google had to shaft Apple and push Android though. Imagine the situation they would be in now if Apple dominated all mobile and they were dependent on their 'generosity' to allow advertising and services through.
However I doubt they are doing this so they can switch off the tap to Google. It won't destroy Google or make Apple much extra money, but will absolutely spark of the thermo-nuclear war Jobs was so keen for. There would probably be enough lawyering to pull global GDP out of its present malaise if they did that.
I agree with all your points, but the big thing Apple has is that they will effectively be pushing this service to every iOS user, and after the free subscription period it is a simple 'buy' click and you're signed up. I think the lack of friction is going to get them a lot of customers very quickly.
As to whether they can compete on Android that will be very interesting. I think it will be hard for them as Android people (speaking anecdotally) can be quite polarised against Apple. This is probably the main reason they are doing the radio station stuff and poaching the top DJs. I'm not sure about that strategy though, we will probably have to wait for the first couple of Apple Watch results to see whether this post Jobs technique of buying coolness is going to work.
I imagine Spotify figure that if they do a surge now and try to match or beat Apple on ancillary services they may very well be able to keep them off Android. Anyway, hopefully the consumer wins out of all this and both companies up their game.