If this were in lieu of the actual, performance-based bonus — the one that actually matters — it might actually be true. I, on the other hand, am happy to have my new Android, though, considering that it's 40% of the value of a completely extra "surprise" bonus that I wasn't even told about when I hired on.
Except that this is in lieu of the paper-cash Christmas bonus — $1k, not $20k+ — not the bonus that actually figures into compensation. That's a different bonus, and it's still coming up. No one was promised a Christmas bonus at Google when they hired on.
That this e-mail is now public makes me weep for my species. Google's famous tight-lippedness to outsiders is a direct consequence of its slightly less famous wide-openness to employees, which is a critical part of Google's internal culture.
I can't even imagine what went through the mind of the person who leaked this. Whining about getting a $400 smartphone instead of $1000 cash — in the midst of an economic crisis that might or might not impact Google's bottom line in the coming year — is perhaps, maybe appropriate on an internal mailing list (if over-the-top and coming off as a spoiled brat). But it's not a f***ing whistle-blow against wrongdoing, worthy of phoning the news media — or, for that matter, ridiculous rumor mills like Valleywag.
($20K in physical paper cash? Where the hell did they get that number? I want to find Valleywag's parallel universe and work for that Google!... except that I suspect the Google in that universe has a goatee, so maybe not.)
Open market operations are not form of bookkeeping, "legitimate" or not. This seems to be the first problem in your understanding. Clearly, records have to be kept of open market operations, but those records are not the operations.
They are a purchase (or sale), obviously, not a form of bookkeeping... but you have to account for the money spent on the purchase (or earned by the sale). If you promise IOUs but aren't good for the money you've promised, then you are committing fraud — even if you are the government. If this were a business or a city government or a state government, people would be in jail for it. But it's the Federal Reserve, so it's "business as usual". Nevermind that the creation of the Federal Reserve itself in 1913 was itself the cause of the Roaring Twenties speculative bubble, and the inevitable spectacular crash as the federally-enforced Ponzi scheme unwound.
So? Physical dollar bills are nothing special, they're just an expense. A fiat currency of account is exactly the same as a physical fiat currency.
(Plus, of course, this isn't true: paper dollars change hands between the Fed and banks all the time, which is, in fact, how all paper dollars get into circulation. The banks pay for the paper dollars out of their reserve accounts.)
A paper currency still maintains a fig leaf of respectability, because inflation is limited by (a) how fast your physical printing presses run, and (b) people noticing that more physical notes are circulating. Previous attempts to inflate a physical fiat currency (e.g. the Civil War Greenback) resulted in a currency crash as people fled from the inflating currency into more stable currencies, like gold coin. Having a fiat currency of account means that (a) you can inflate your currency as much as you desire, and (b) people won't notice it as quickly, because numbers on a check or credit card statement don't have the same visceral impact as piles of paper bills or stacks of metal coins. Having a currency of account is a move to reduce accountability and thus hide fraud.
The velocity of money is the number of times the same dollar is spent (within a bounded, temporally and often geographically as well, universe of analysis), whether it touches a bank anywhere in between is irrelevant. It is not the magnification in the actual supply of money caused by fractional reserve banking.
In a system where the vast majority of money is in the form of a fiat currency of account, money cannot change hands except through the banking system. All transactions begin as deposits in the account of the buyer and end up as deposits in the account of the seller. This is what allows the Federal Reserve's open market operations to have more than a trivially small effect.
Except when it doesn't, as now, when the Fed is pouring out money, and prices are deflating. But, yes, the a major point of open market operations is to influence inflation, both by contracting the money supply to avoid high inflation (tight money policy), and to expand the money supply to fight deflation (loose money policy) as the Fed is currently attempting.
The deflation of prices in the current economic environment is inevitably a temporary matter. There is a massive amount of pent-up monetary inflation that has been pumped into the system, but cash is a hedge against uncertainty and banks are facing a mountain of uncertainty, therefore banks are choosing to hold reserves nearly equal to 100% of demand deposits because they're terrified that they'll be the next bank run victim. The result is that the multiplier effect isn't currently happening, therefore the Fed's actions are having little to no immediate effect. As that uncertainty
Nearly everybody says this. Hardly anybody says why. Nobody who says why does so without invoking long-discredited Keynesian ideas.
If inflation were simply, "Oh, I woke up with twice as many dollar bills in my pocket, but oh, prices doubled overnight", then inflation would have zero effect. Instead, inflation is time-skewed: the Fed creates money, and those who touch the money first can buy things before the prices have risen in response to created money. Therefore, those who get lots of money directly from banks benefit from inflation: big businesses who take out million dollar loans. Those who don't get lots of money directly from banks see their incomes fall relative to prices: people on low and fixed incomes, i.e. the poor. Doubly so because wage changes lag price changes. In other words, inflation is a net transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich: a hidden regressive tax.
Deflation, logically, is the opposite: people who hold cash benefit first from falling prices. Since (again) wage changes lag price changes, those on low and fixed incomes will benefit the most. Frankly, with the rich-poor gap having grown as skewed as it has over the past 50 years, we could use a good decade's worth of deflation just to partially undo the mess. The corrupt business interests that lobby DC won't let that happen, of course, but maybe we'll get a year or two of benefit out of it before they kill it.
Actually, you missed something in the above. If you loaned me $10, then the following transactions occur:
You: -$10 (paid out to me)
You: +$10 (debt asset)
Me : +$10 (cash I got from you)
Me : -$10 (debt liability I owe you, which you forgot to mention earlier.)
You missed something as well. People weren't pushing debt liabilities on third parties, but they were pushing debt assets on third parties. The debt assets were being treated as real money, as a backing of financial value for a purchase by the debt asset holder, when they weren't real money. And when debt assets were used as collateral for yet more debt, the inherent asymmetry in the system permitted unbounded recursion.
Dude, fractional reserve banking is the biggest plutocrat conspiracy ever built. The people who are against it are no right-wingers (although some are stupid enough to think they are).
Fractional reserve banking is the cause of inflation. Why? Because IOUs issued by banks are indistinguishable from actual money (by law, thanks to Federal Reserve Notes and legal tender laws). Because IOUs issued by banks get treated as real money, they get deposited in other banks. Then the secondary banks themselves treat the IOUs as real money, and loan out yet more IOUs. If reserve ratios fell to 0%, the result would be infinite money creation. Since reserve ratios are fixed at 10% by law, the result is 10-fold money creation, with a 10-fold multiplier on every action taken by the Federal Reserve.
Why is inflation a plutocrat conspiracy? Because the people who first touch the newly created IOU money are the ones who benefit most from it: prices haven't risen yet, even though new money has been created, so if you touch the loans first you can stock up on unnaturally cheap goods, depriving other people of what they need. Who gets the most loans? Big businesses. Any given big business will take out millions of dollars per year in loans. Who gets the fewest loans? The poor. They get loans anywhere from once every 10 years to never, and in amounts that never break the $1 million mark. So the poor get higher prices sooner than they get higher income, while the rich get higher income before they get higher prices. The net result is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Inflation is the very reason why the gap between poor and rich has grown so dramatically over the last 50 years.
No true liberal would ever support the current system, if they knew the terrible truth that it was enacted by big business interests and the proto-fascists of the 1910s (including people who went on to praise Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1930s).
No, its not. And regulated fractional reserve banking requires banks to get their money from somewhere, contrary to your indication that it does not. They have to acquire the reserves, and the permission to issue more money via reserve regulations.
Have you read up on what an "open market operation" is? I have, several times, and I still don't know how that ever passed for legitimate bookkeeping. Here's roughly how it works:
The Fed sets an interest rate target. By itself, this would be tilting at windmills that meant nothing. But if banks are charging interest rates that are higher than the target, the Fed buys securities (usually Treasury bonds) from the banks, depositing money directly into the banks' individual reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve in order to purchase them. Because the banks now have more reserves, they can make more loans. This is a rise in supply of loans without a corresponding rise in demand for them, and thus loan prices (interest rates) fall through competition.
Wait, where did the Fed get the money? That's the 2 Trillion Dollar Question. Federal reserve accounts are just ledgers full of numbers. Today they're spreadsheets on a computer; previously, paper ledgers were used, but it's the same idea. Either way, no physical dollar bills ever changed hands from Fed to bank, ever since the Fed was created in 1913. And, when you unwind it all, which is a long and annoying process described in very obfuscatory language on the Fed's own websites, the Fed basically prints money to buy back the government's own debt. The Fed just marks a number under its own "Fed liabilities" column, labeling it "Oops, my bad, this is an IOU not real money", but the Fed also gains a security with equal dollar value to the IOU, dropped under the "Fed assets" column, so the Fed's books come out with a net change of $0.
And, of course, because the bank selling the securities now has more money sitting in its reserve account, and it doesn't need to hold the reserves to cover any new checking deposits, it can make profits by lending the money out. The recipients spend it, and those who were paid deposit it into their own checking accounts. At this point 90% of that gets loaned out a second time (10% reserve requirements[*]), and 90% of that gets loaned out a third time (net of 0.90*0.90=0.81, for those counting at home), and so on until the money supply has expanded by nearly 10-fold (limit 1/0.10=10 as t goes to infinity).
([*] Actually, it's worse than that. The 10% reserve requirement is the figure for demand deposits, i.e. checking accounts. For time deposits -- i.e. savings accounts, CDs, and anything else with time restrictions -- the reserve requirement is 0% instead. And the law recently changed so that banks can automatically roll over customers' demand deposits into time deposits, without asking or telling the customers, if money sits in a demand deposit account for long enough. So the process can potentially reach infinity.)
This flow of money from bank to bank is the "velocity of money" euphemism that economists speak of. What's actually happening is that the small amount of monetary inflation created through open market operations is multiplied through fractional banking, and at the same time the monetary inflation transforms into price inflation driving up prices as it changes hands. This saves the Fed work, because each new round of loans adds more competition on interest rates, but each new round also drives up price inflation to ever-increasing heights. This is the reason why the government eventually has to "cool off the economy" during boom years (i.e. slow down the "velocity of money" and decrease monetary inflation) by raising target rates and pumping money back out of the economy through security sales. If the Fed didn't take back and destroy the IOUs (thus raising interest rates), inflation would get out of control and the economy would fall into a stagflationary recession (i.e. what happened in the 1970s when politicians practiced straight Keynesian economics and just opened the money spigot).
On top of this TCP hasn't seen a major update since the 80's. Most of it was implemented to deal with a very different internet than the one we have today. If you can side step TCP's shortcomings by doing the congestion control more efficiently at the application level then why not give it a shot?
This isn't a fair characterization of Classical Liberals. Classical Liberals (i.e. laissez faire libertarians, a rare breed these days) are by nature enemies of Conservatism. Conservatism, perhaps best represented in the US tradition by Alexander Hamilton, seeks to re-create the "moral clarity" of divine kingships and feudalism, by having the government legislate morality, foment nationalism, start foreign wars, and favor "moral" businesses. In short, fascism. The fact that a lot of the Classical Liberals have teamed up with the Conservatives is a historical accident: after many Classical Liberals abandoned the optimism that made them radicals, they borrowed Conservative ideas and created Communism. The Conservatives, in response, raged against Communism as a threat — and correctly so, as Communism threatened to use Conservatism's own weapons against it, outcompeting and destroying Conservatism on a much shorter timescale than the radicals of Classical Liberalism. To gain allies, they positioned themselves as victims: Conservatism hid its agenda behind loud screeds against Communism, and here in the US they went further by cloaking nationalist rhetoric behind libertarian rhetoric — a task ironically made easier by the founding ideals of the US. Classical Liberals took the bait, and many have even taken to calling themselves "conservative" ever since.
But, despite the misnaming, Classical Liberalism was and is a fundamentally left-wing, revolutionary idea — one fundamentally at odds with the Conservative goal of undoing the Liberal revolution and restoring the centralized power of the State. Murray Rothbard's Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty is an illuminating read on this subject.
The whole concept of working hard to earn a good income and have a good quality of life seems to be disappearing.
Up front warning: this might well come across as a slightly crazy "THAT guy" ramble. If so, feel free to smile and nod as you back away slowly.
In light of the recent financial crisis, I've been reading up on Austrian-school economics. One of the key insights held by Austrians over other economic schools is that interest rates exist because humans have time preferences: if I offer you a choice between giving you $100 one week from now versus $110 one year from now, you'll take the $100 because having the money now is more valuable than receiving the extra $10 later. Interest rates and time preferences are intimately related. Therefore, government interference with interest rates manipulates peoples' time preferences.
First, a quick digression. What is "investment" in the context of an individual or a family? Education is the obvious one. Cars are another: fuel efficiency and reliability both reduce the operating costs of owning a car. There are also some home improvements, like better insulation or more energy-efficient HVAC systems. Cosmetic improvements like flower beds might be investments too, if it means you spend more time at home admiring the view instead of getting out of the house and spending on entertainment. Even food can be construed as an investment, or happiness itself if you squint at it right. Through the right lens, all human actions have economic interpretations as investments of some sort: all actions are directed toward goals, whatever those goals may be, and economics is the practice of attaining those goals at the lowest possible costs (i.e. highest possible efficiencies, i.e. satisfying the maximum number of goals). Money just happens to be a frequent intermediary in this process of goal-attainment — there's nothing special about money that makes financial investments better than happiness investments. (This is the basic thrust of Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, one of the luminaries of the Austrian school.)
Okay, digression over. What about interest rates and time preferences?
In a healthy market, the supply side of loans is relatively simple. If people have relaxed time preferences and don't mind saving their money for the future, then interest rates are low because lots of money is available for investment. Likewise, if people have very strong time preferences and want to spend their money immediately, interest rates are high because there's less money available to invest.
The demand side is a little more subtle....
High interest rates are a signal that, if you want to make any big purchases you need to save your own money, because you won't be able to afford credit. Also, if you save up for a big-ticket item, it should be for something that has a good chance of paying for itself: since it only makes sense to save up for one big-ticket item at a time, you can't save up for something very risky or you'll risk losing everything you've saved. The net result is that you favor low-risk investments, especially those with short-term payoffs: you only buy big-ticket items if you're sure they'll add a lot of value to your life, but otherwise stick to the necessities.
Low interest rates, by contrast, signal that you have the choice of making big purchases now and paying for them later. If you buy something that reduces your costs over the long run, then you can pay off the loan using the cost savings and come out ahead. You can also feel more confident about risk: by making multiple investments simultaneously, you can spreading out the risk that any one investment will fail to pay off. You can also pay off the loan for one investment with the cost savings from a previous investment. The net result is that you favor high-risk investments: you still buy necessities, but your attention is n
Again, playing devils advocate, the manufacturing process and use of the product is also fairly repeatable.
Again, the repeatability of the manufacturing process is not in question. It's the viability of alternate manufacturing processes. The point is the parameter space: a tiny tweak in the manufacturing process can have large, beneficial effects on the process, result, or both. Or a tweak can have almost zero effect. Either way, the tweaked process is different from the original process, and thus should not infringe on the patent — this encourages exploration of the parameter space (i.e. innovation).
Cryptographically strong hashes are one of the few bits of mathematics that gets even remotely recipe-like, but the fact that you had to hypothesize a fictional hash with semi-magical properties (i.e. good only for ISBN numbers, but better than MD5 for that one purpose) indicates that even cryptographically strong hashes don't have enough of a parameter space to justify patents.
And no, the Quake fast square roots function was not worthy of a patent. It was perhaps worthy of a copyright, because it was a highly clever and somewhat creative way of implementing Newton's Algorithm^WMethod on x86 floating point hardware. But Newton's Method itself doesn't deserve a patent, because there's only one way to accomplish it — there are no replacements for Newton's Method on the horizon, there is no unexplored parameter space surrounding approximated square roots, there's no innovation whatsoever in that problem space that any patent could possibly reward.
Substitute "blueprint" for "source code" and "machine" for "binary"...
In the unlikely event that I come up with, say, a new hashing algorithm, then I should be able to patent it in the same way as if I come up with a new type of CV joint.
But that misses my whole point about "algorithm" versus "recipe". An algorithm is a sequence of steps. A recipe is a sequence of steps. But beyond that superficial similarity, they're not at all similar. The boolean logic of a computer is axiomatically true and 100% repeatable, so it's algorithmic. A new CV joint might perform exactly the same "operation" as another CV joint, from a mathematical standpoint of torque and friction, yet have different operational characteristics (e.g. reliability) that don't directly impact the "operation" being performed.
If people were patenting FPGA patterns that exploited analog properties of a particular make and model of "digital" FPGAs, I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with that. It's far more recipe-like than algorithm-like, to the extent that evolved FPGA patterns discovered and exploited said analog properties long before humans ever imagined that they could produce working circuits. It's something that involves slogging through wet and messy physical parameter space, rather than the stark certainty of math and idealized computation.
I'll be the first to admit that this "recipe" versus "algorithm" line is not a binary, black-and-white divide. (See, for instance, the attacks on secure Java code from within a "secure" bytecode sandbox utilizing random bitflips in the underlying physical RAM to eventually get a pointer^Wreference to something naughty.) And there might not even be a clear way of drawing a sharp line in legalese that the patent trolls won't just erode away in another 50 years. But I think it's worth a shot, because it really gets at the essence of what patents are supposed to be for.
Of course, this is skirting around the basic fact that makes these types of arguments stupid to begin with: All Patents Are Algorithms. I thought this was a site for computer nerds, which presumably suggests some familiarity with computational information theory. That is the elephant in the room that everyone is trying really hard not to notice, which suggests more of an emotional than rational reaction to the topic.
Not really, no. Well, maybe these days it's true. But originally patents functioned as a sort of "copyright for mechanical devices". The design of a mechanical device wasn't copyrightable, because it wasn't fixed in a medium. (Blueprints were fixed in a medium and thus hypothetically-if-not-actually copyrightable, but competitors would just buy an example machine for themselves and create their own blueprints through reverse engineering.) And the mechanical nature of patents makes them more akin to recipes than to algorithms. An algorithm is a universal mathematical truth proven from fundamental axioms. A recipe seems to kind of work, in the context of the physical world. And that difference means there is much more room for innovation in a recipe than in an algorithm: while algorithms are often proven to be either optimal or within a given bounds of optimality, recipes have such a broad, unexplored, uncharacterized parameter space that big surprises can lie in wait. And patents were originally a way of rewarding such exploration of mechanical recipes.
Since there cannot be infinite regress of such causes...
Why not? The Greeks didn't know Calculus. Taking their advice on infinite anything is a bad idea. Zeno managed to "prove" that time doesn't flow forward, because an infinite regress was "impossible" and motion is an infinite regress of infinitesimals because you can always cut both distance and time into halves. Why can't the universe be changing and yet without a beginning?
NSL didn't arise from nothing, because each child involved had communicated with their parents via home sign systems, knew written Spanish, and were being trained in lipreading of spoken Spanish. NSL first developed as a pidgin of their individual home signs, and then developed into a full creole language. Without the home signs, the pidgin never would've formed in the first place, and influence from written Spanish might have shaped the language in very significant ways.
If you ask me, though, all the thinking about "souls" is misplaced. They're personalities, not souls; they're physical, not spiritual; they're mortal, not eternal; and they don't survive death.
Oh, and despite all that, I'm a cheerful optimist.
It seems to me that there's this revolutionary new religion out there, called Judaism, that has a creation myth that better describes a soul. Then there's this offshoot cult of Judaism, that takes it a step farther... so let me try to explain....
So our 2nd law of thermodynamics, while completely valid in the frame of reference of our universe, probably is not universally valid.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the crankiest crankery I've ever seen cranked.
I don't necessarily believe in the soul, but your example does not prove its inexistence.
I actually obliquely referenced this in my post, when I said "And as flawed as that 'proof' is, it's more proof than you offer for your baseless assertions about Gödel's incompleteness theorems." I'm quite aware that there are many nebulous ideas about the soul that disclaim all testable predictions and are thus impossible to prove one way or another.
One could counter by making a conjecture that the brain is simply an interface between the soul and the physical world.
Sure, the idea's been done before, notably by Descartes and his wild-a** guessing about the pineal gland. But there's the deeper question of what the soul does. The more we discover about the materialist workings of the brain, the less mysterious thoughts become, and the result is that Interactionism is gradually giving way to Epiphenomenalism: where the "soul" experiences the body's sensations but only erroneously believes that it has control over the body, as it just happens by coincidence that (through purely materialistic means) the body acts as the soul independently had willed.
That's an emotional positioning that doesn't make any logical sense. If you say that the soul is killable or divisible or a physical part of the brain, then you've already agreed that it exists, and are merely disagreeing about its properties. And yet you say that it doesn't exist.
I'm essentially arguing that the "soul" is a attribution error. Ancient peoples saw leaves rustling in the wind and, having no knowledge of high pressure systems or the ideal gas law, they assumed that an intelligent higher being must've caused the wind. So they invented gods to explain wind, and whatever emotional effect the wind happened to have on them was explained as a message from the gods.
Likewise, modern religious people see their fellow humans thinking intelligently and having self-aware philosophical thoughts and, having no knowledge of how the underlying neurons and brain chemistry bring about this state of affairs, they assume that an intelligent higher being must've put some kind of magical animating force (i.e. a "soul") inside each individual to make them intelligent and unique.
The problem: the pro-soul crowd can't come up with a good explanation for who or what has a soul, or how you can spot one. Most say that humans, and humans alone, have souls. Some say that higher primates have souls, but not fish. Others say every physical thing has a soul, up to and including places. None of them can sort anything out or come to any sort of agreement — and don't even bring up AIs or Turing tests. To me, the whole thing looks like the proverbial "angels on the head of a pin" debate.
What's more, even though they all agree that humans seem to have them, they can't agree on when humans get them. Catholics are fond of saying that the soul is inserted at the moment of fertilization — but that would mean homozygous twins share a single soul, which contradicts their belief that the soul is eternal and indivisible. Others believe that the soul gets inserted at some later point — some cultures have held that the soul grows and isn't even fully formed until adulthood.
If you ask me, though, all the thinking about "souls" is misplaced. They're personalities, not souls; they're physical, not spiritual; they're mortal, not eternal; and they don't survive death.
Which of Godel's incompleteness theorems tells me about deity's knowledge?
For one: in many cases, there isn't an answer. Take Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Zermelo was surprised that a certain statement wasn't true in ZF set theory, so he formulated the Axiom of Choice ("Every set has a choice function"), which was later proven to be independent of the ZF axioms.
Choice makes a certain amount of intuitive sense... except that it leads to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which doesn't. But the absence of Choice means that you can't pick a real number from the real number line, because at best you'll pick a computable number — and the set of computable numbers is only countably infinite, which is far smaller than the uncountably infinite real numbers. So, if Choice is false, the real numbers don't exist. That doesn't make much sense, either.
Actually, there is a 'higher intelligence' giving human beings thoughts as you put it (i.e., souls). You don't have to start with this assumption though as the implications of Godel's theorems would lead you to that conclusion if you start with them (and the theorems are pretty rock solid).
Bullshit. The only thing Gödel's incompleteness theorems prove is that no knowledge, not even human knowledge or even a deity's knowledge, can be both consistent and complete. Human beings are so ridiculously inconsistent that completeness doesn't even enter into the picture and Gödel doesn't apply.
Alzheimer's is proof by counterexample that souls don't exist. Ever had a relative die of Alzheimer's? My grandmother died of the fast-acting, early-onset form. She was symptomatic in her late 40s and was barely 50 when she was diagnosed. Within 5 years she was behaving like a hypersexed sullen teenager, after 7 years she completely lost the ability to speak a grammatically correct sentence, and 9 years in she died as a bedridden zombie incapable of chewing and swallowing her own food. Her "soul" died piece by piece before my family's eyes, leaving first a wild animal with the power of speech (in the form of babble), and then only an empty husk of a body. The "soul" is divisible, and physical disease can kill it piecemeal by attacking the brain. Therefore, the "soul" is a physical part of the brain. And as flawed as that "proof" is, it's more proof than you offer for your baseless assertions about Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Clinton still signed that awful Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act... although one could argue he had no choice since it passed with HUGE support from his own Democratic party: "The final bill resolving the differences was passed by the Senate 90-8 and by the House 362-57"
That was after they'd managed to coat it in Democrat-friendly concessions. The first vote, on the bill itself sans riders, is the vote that actually reveals what the Democrats felt about it.
(While coating bad-tasting legislation in candied earmarks is a time-"honored" US tradition, it's not fixable so long as we're using a voting system vulnerable to Duverger's Law. Two parties is not enough competition to stop riders.)
Which brings the blame around to the Democrats for the bank failures, not just the Republicans as so many are falsely claiming.
I'll be the first to admit that the Republicans don't deserve all the blame here. The Democrats were quite gung ho for leaving Fannie and Freddie unfettered by oversight, which put them in the no-mans land of being government-sponsored yet largely unregulated — a recipe for abuse. In particular, Barney Frank's refusal to face reality and admit his mistakes has been an embarrassment to me — as a gay man, a Democrat, and an American.
That said, The Republicans held absolute control over the House for a solid 12-year stretch from 1995 to 2007, and they ran the Senate for the same period minus a two-year gap (2001-2003) when they were merely tied. From the Netscape IPO to the Paulson bailout, the last two economic crises happened on their watch. Also, while the Republicans love pointing to Democratic support for the CRA, the CRA is largely a non-issue — institutions subject to CRA rules have had lower default rates than the rest of the mortgage industry, and it's high time the Republicans stopped crying about it and quit trying to punt their share of blame. While it's not all their fault, they did seek and accept the power, and with the power comes the responsibility — and thus the blame when things go wrong.
There's no need to blame the Democrats for the dot-com or housing crises. Now that they hold the power, I'm sure that the popularity of neo-Keynesian ideas among the Democrats will brew up a shiny new crisis that properly belongs to them. (Which is probably going to be even more spectacular than the current one: the next one will probably include hyperinflation and the total collapse of the US dollar, especially if the Democrats go through with their plan for a second stimulus package but fail to raise taxes to pay for it. The Republicans ought to be happy that they've stepped aside, because they're dodging a bullet on this one.)
Slashdot Mirror
If this were in lieu of the actual, performance-based bonus — the one that actually matters — it might actually be true. I, on the other hand, am happy to have my new Android, though, considering that it's 40% of the value of a completely extra "surprise" bonus that I wasn't even told about when I hired on.
Except that this is in lieu of the paper-cash Christmas bonus — $1k, not $20k+ — not the bonus that actually figures into compensation. That's a different bonus, and it's still coming up. No one was promised a Christmas bonus at Google when they hired on.
That this e-mail is now public makes me weep for my species. Google's famous tight-lippedness to outsiders is a direct consequence of its slightly less famous wide-openness to employees, which is a critical part of Google's internal culture.
I can't even imagine what went through the mind of the person who leaked this. Whining about getting a $400 smartphone instead of $1000 cash — in the midst of an economic crisis that might or might not impact Google's bottom line in the coming year — is perhaps, maybe appropriate on an internal mailing list (if over-the-top and coming off as a spoiled brat). But it's not a f***ing whistle-blow against wrongdoing, worthy of phoning the news media — or, for that matter, ridiculous rumor mills like Valleywag.
($20K in physical paper cash? Where the hell did they get that number? I want to find Valleywag's parallel universe and work for that Google! ... except that I suspect the Google in that universe has a goatee, so maybe not.)
They are a purchase (or sale), obviously, not a form of bookkeeping... but you have to account for the money spent on the purchase (or earned by the sale). If you promise IOUs but aren't good for the money you've promised, then you are committing fraud — even if you are the government. If this were a business or a city government or a state government, people would be in jail for it. But it's the Federal Reserve, so it's "business as usual". Nevermind that the creation of the Federal Reserve itself in 1913 was itself the cause of the Roaring Twenties speculative bubble, and the inevitable spectacular crash as the federally-enforced Ponzi scheme unwound.
A paper currency still maintains a fig leaf of respectability, because inflation is limited by (a) how fast your physical printing presses run, and (b) people noticing that more physical notes are circulating. Previous attempts to inflate a physical fiat currency (e.g. the Civil War Greenback) resulted in a currency crash as people fled from the inflating currency into more stable currencies, like gold coin. Having a fiat currency of account means that (a) you can inflate your currency as much as you desire, and (b) people won't notice it as quickly, because numbers on a check or credit card statement don't have the same visceral impact as piles of paper bills or stacks of metal coins. Having a currency of account is a move to reduce accountability and thus hide fraud.
In a system where the vast majority of money is in the form of a fiat currency of account, money cannot change hands except through the banking system. All transactions begin as deposits in the account of the buyer and end up as deposits in the account of the seller. This is what allows the Federal Reserve's open market operations to have more than a trivially small effect.
The deflation of prices in the current economic environment is inevitably a temporary matter. There is a massive amount of pent-up monetary inflation that has been pumped into the system, but cash is a hedge against uncertainty and banks are facing a mountain of uncertainty, therefore banks are choosing to hold reserves nearly equal to 100% of demand deposits because they're terrified that they'll be the next bank run victim. The result is that the multiplier effect isn't currently happening, therefore the Fed's actions are having little to no immediate effect. As that uncertainty
Nearly everybody says this. Hardly anybody says why. Nobody who says why does so without invoking long-discredited Keynesian ideas.
If inflation were simply, "Oh, I woke up with twice as many dollar bills in my pocket, but oh, prices doubled overnight", then inflation would have zero effect. Instead, inflation is time-skewed: the Fed creates money, and those who touch the money first can buy things before the prices have risen in response to created money. Therefore, those who get lots of money directly from banks benefit from inflation: big businesses who take out million dollar loans. Those who don't get lots of money directly from banks see their incomes fall relative to prices: people on low and fixed incomes, i.e. the poor. Doubly so because wage changes lag price changes. In other words, inflation is a net transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich: a hidden regressive tax.
Deflation, logically, is the opposite: people who hold cash benefit first from falling prices. Since (again) wage changes lag price changes, those on low and fixed incomes will benefit the most. Frankly, with the rich-poor gap having grown as skewed as it has over the past 50 years, we could use a good decade's worth of deflation just to partially undo the mess. The corrupt business interests that lobby DC won't let that happen, of course, but maybe we'll get a year or two of benefit out of it before they kill it.
You missed something as well. People weren't pushing debt liabilities on third parties, but they were pushing debt assets on third parties. The debt assets were being treated as real money, as a backing of financial value for a purchase by the debt asset holder, when they weren't real money. And when debt assets were used as collateral for yet more debt, the inherent asymmetry in the system permitted unbounded recursion.
Dude, fractional reserve banking is the biggest plutocrat conspiracy ever built. The people who are against it are no right-wingers (although some are stupid enough to think they are).
Fractional reserve banking is the cause of inflation. Why? Because IOUs issued by banks are indistinguishable from actual money (by law, thanks to Federal Reserve Notes and legal tender laws). Because IOUs issued by banks get treated as real money, they get deposited in other banks. Then the secondary banks themselves treat the IOUs as real money, and loan out yet more IOUs. If reserve ratios fell to 0%, the result would be infinite money creation. Since reserve ratios are fixed at 10% by law, the result is 10-fold money creation, with a 10-fold multiplier on every action taken by the Federal Reserve.
Why is inflation a plutocrat conspiracy? Because the people who first touch the newly created IOU money are the ones who benefit most from it: prices haven't risen yet, even though new money has been created, so if you touch the loans first you can stock up on unnaturally cheap goods, depriving other people of what they need. Who gets the most loans? Big businesses. Any given big business will take out millions of dollars per year in loans. Who gets the fewest loans? The poor. They get loans anywhere from once every 10 years to never, and in amounts that never break the $1 million mark. So the poor get higher prices sooner than they get higher income, while the rich get higher income before they get higher prices. The net result is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Inflation is the very reason why the gap between poor and rich has grown so dramatically over the last 50 years.
No true liberal would ever support the current system, if they knew the terrible truth that it was enacted by big business interests and the proto-fascists of the 1910s (including people who went on to praise Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1930s).
Have you read up on what an "open market operation" is? I have, several times, and I still don't know how that ever passed for legitimate bookkeeping. Here's roughly how it works:
The Fed sets an interest rate target. By itself, this would be tilting at windmills that meant nothing. But if banks are charging interest rates that are higher than the target, the Fed buys securities (usually Treasury bonds) from the banks, depositing money directly into the banks' individual reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve in order to purchase them. Because the banks now have more reserves, they can make more loans. This is a rise in supply of loans without a corresponding rise in demand for them, and thus loan prices (interest rates) fall through competition.
Wait, where did the Fed get the money? That's the 2 Trillion Dollar Question. Federal reserve accounts are just ledgers full of numbers. Today they're spreadsheets on a computer; previously, paper ledgers were used, but it's the same idea. Either way, no physical dollar bills ever changed hands from Fed to bank, ever since the Fed was created in 1913. And, when you unwind it all, which is a long and annoying process described in very obfuscatory language on the Fed's own websites, the Fed basically prints money to buy back the government's own debt. The Fed just marks a number under its own "Fed liabilities" column, labeling it "Oops, my bad, this is an IOU not real money", but the Fed also gains a security with equal dollar value to the IOU, dropped under the "Fed assets" column, so the Fed's books come out with a net change of $0.
And, of course, because the bank selling the securities now has more money sitting in its reserve account, and it doesn't need to hold the reserves to cover any new checking deposits, it can make profits by lending the money out. The recipients spend it, and those who were paid deposit it into their own checking accounts. At this point 90% of that gets loaned out a second time (10% reserve requirements[*]), and 90% of that gets loaned out a third time (net of 0.90*0.90=0.81, for those counting at home), and so on until the money supply has expanded by nearly 10-fold (limit 1/0.10=10 as t goes to infinity).
([*] Actually, it's worse than that. The 10% reserve requirement is the figure for demand deposits, i.e. checking accounts. For time deposits -- i.e. savings accounts, CDs, and anything else with time restrictions -- the reserve requirement is 0% instead. And the law recently changed so that banks can automatically roll over customers' demand deposits into time deposits, without asking or telling the customers, if money sits in a demand deposit account for long enough. So the process can potentially reach infinity.)
This flow of money from bank to bank is the "velocity of money" euphemism that economists speak of. What's actually happening is that the small amount of monetary inflation created through open market operations is multiplied through fractional banking, and at the same time the monetary inflation transforms into price inflation driving up prices as it changes hands. This saves the Fed work, because each new round of loans adds more competition on interest rates, but each new round also drives up price inflation to ever-increasing heights. This is the reason why the government eventually has to "cool off the economy" during boom years (i.e. slow down the "velocity of money" and decrease monetary inflation) by raising target rates and pumping money back out of the economy through security sales. If the Fed didn't take back and destroy the IOUs (thus raising interest rates), inflation would get out of control and the economy would fall into a stagflationary recession (i.e. what happened in the 1970s when politicians practiced straight Keynesian economics and just opened the money spigot).
*blink*
TCP/IP is missing those same features. Oh noes!
Uhh, TCP Vegas, TCP New Reno, BIC and CUBIC? All of which have been implemented in the Linux kernel?
TCP has only been standing still since the 80's if you're using an OS from the 80's... or a Microsoft OS.
This isn't a fair characterization of Classical Liberals. Classical Liberals (i.e. laissez faire libertarians, a rare breed these days) are by nature enemies of Conservatism. Conservatism, perhaps best represented in the US tradition by Alexander Hamilton, seeks to re-create the "moral clarity" of divine kingships and feudalism, by having the government legislate morality, foment nationalism, start foreign wars, and favor "moral" businesses. In short, fascism. The fact that a lot of the Classical Liberals have teamed up with the Conservatives is a historical accident: after many Classical Liberals abandoned the optimism that made them radicals, they borrowed Conservative ideas and created Communism. The Conservatives, in response, raged against Communism as a threat — and correctly so, as Communism threatened to use Conservatism's own weapons against it, outcompeting and destroying Conservatism on a much shorter timescale than the radicals of Classical Liberalism. To gain allies, they positioned themselves as victims: Conservatism hid its agenda behind loud screeds against Communism, and here in the US they went further by cloaking nationalist rhetoric behind libertarian rhetoric — a task ironically made easier by the founding ideals of the US. Classical Liberals took the bait, and many have even taken to calling themselves "conservative" ever since.
But, despite the misnaming, Classical Liberalism was and is a fundamentally left-wing, revolutionary idea — one fundamentally at odds with the Conservative goal of undoing the Liberal revolution and restoring the centralized power of the State. Murray Rothbard's Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty is an illuminating read on this subject.
Up front warning: this might well come across as a slightly crazy "THAT guy" ramble. If so, feel free to smile and nod as you back away slowly.
In light of the recent financial crisis, I've been reading up on Austrian-school economics. One of the key insights held by Austrians over other economic schools is that interest rates exist because humans have time preferences: if I offer you a choice between giving you $100 one week from now versus $110 one year from now, you'll take the $100 because having the money now is more valuable than receiving the extra $10 later. Interest rates and time preferences are intimately related. Therefore, government interference with interest rates manipulates peoples' time preferences.
First, a quick digression. What is "investment" in the context of an individual or a family? Education is the obvious one. Cars are another: fuel efficiency and reliability both reduce the operating costs of owning a car. There are also some home improvements, like better insulation or more energy-efficient HVAC systems. Cosmetic improvements like flower beds might be investments too, if it means you spend more time at home admiring the view instead of getting out of the house and spending on entertainment. Even food can be construed as an investment, or happiness itself if you squint at it right. Through the right lens, all human actions have economic interpretations as investments of some sort: all actions are directed toward goals, whatever those goals may be, and economics is the practice of attaining those goals at the lowest possible costs (i.e. highest possible efficiencies, i.e. satisfying the maximum number of goals). Money just happens to be a frequent intermediary in this process of goal-attainment — there's nothing special about money that makes financial investments better than happiness investments. (This is the basic thrust of Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, one of the luminaries of the Austrian school.)
Okay, digression over. What about interest rates and time preferences?
In a healthy market, the supply side of loans is relatively simple. If people have relaxed time preferences and don't mind saving their money for the future, then interest rates are low because lots of money is available for investment. Likewise, if people have very strong time preferences and want to spend their money immediately, interest rates are high because there's less money available to invest.
The demand side is a little more subtle....
High interest rates are a signal that, if you want to make any big purchases you need to save your own money, because you won't be able to afford credit. Also, if you save up for a big-ticket item, it should be for something that has a good chance of paying for itself: since it only makes sense to save up for one big-ticket item at a time, you can't save up for something very risky or you'll risk losing everything you've saved. The net result is that you favor low-risk investments, especially those with short-term payoffs: you only buy big-ticket items if you're sure they'll add a lot of value to your life, but otherwise stick to the necessities.
Low interest rates, by contrast, signal that you have the choice of making big purchases now and paying for them later. If you buy something that reduces your costs over the long run, then you can pay off the loan using the cost savings and come out ahead. You can also feel more confident about risk: by making multiple investments simultaneously, you can spreading out the risk that any one investment will fail to pay off. You can also pay off the loan for one investment with the cost savings from a previous investment. The net result is that you favor high-risk investments: you still buy necessities, but your attention is n
Again, the repeatability of the manufacturing process is not in question. It's the viability of alternate manufacturing processes. The point is the parameter space: a tiny tweak in the manufacturing process can have large, beneficial effects on the process, result, or both. Or a tweak can have almost zero effect. Either way, the tweaked process is different from the original process, and thus should not infringe on the patent — this encourages exploration of the parameter space (i.e. innovation).
Cryptographically strong hashes are one of the few bits of mathematics that gets even remotely recipe-like, but the fact that you had to hypothesize a fictional hash with semi-magical properties (i.e. good only for ISBN numbers, but better than MD5 for that one purpose) indicates that even cryptographically strong hashes don't have enough of a parameter space to justify patents.
And no, the Quake fast square roots function was not worthy of a patent. It was perhaps worthy of a copyright, because it was a highly clever and somewhat creative way of implementing Newton's Algorithm^WMethod on x86 floating point hardware. But Newton's Method itself doesn't deserve a patent, because there's only one way to accomplish it — there are no replacements for Newton's Method on the horizon, there is no unexplored parameter space surrounding approximated square roots, there's no innovation whatsoever in that problem space that any patent could possibly reward.
But that misses my whole point about "algorithm" versus "recipe". An algorithm is a sequence of steps. A recipe is a sequence of steps. But beyond that superficial similarity, they're not at all similar. The boolean logic of a computer is axiomatically true and 100% repeatable, so it's algorithmic. A new CV joint might perform exactly the same "operation" as another CV joint, from a mathematical standpoint of torque and friction, yet have different operational characteristics (e.g. reliability) that don't directly impact the "operation" being performed.
If people were patenting FPGA patterns that exploited analog properties of a particular make and model of "digital" FPGAs, I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with that. It's far more recipe-like than algorithm-like, to the extent that evolved FPGA patterns discovered and exploited said analog properties long before humans ever imagined that they could produce working circuits. It's something that involves slogging through wet and messy physical parameter space, rather than the stark certainty of math and idealized computation.
I'll be the first to admit that this "recipe" versus "algorithm" line is not a binary, black-and-white divide. (See, for instance, the attacks on secure Java code from within a "secure" bytecode sandbox utilizing random bitflips in the underlying physical RAM to eventually get a pointer^Wreference to something naughty.) And there might not even be a clear way of drawing a sharp line in legalese that the patent trolls won't just erode away in another 50 years. But I think it's worth a shot, because it really gets at the essence of what patents are supposed to be for.
Not really, no. Well, maybe these days it's true. But originally patents functioned as a sort of "copyright for mechanical devices". The design of a mechanical device wasn't copyrightable, because it wasn't fixed in a medium. (Blueprints were fixed in a medium and thus hypothetically-if-not-actually copyrightable, but competitors would just buy an example machine for themselves and create their own blueprints through reverse engineering.) And the mechanical nature of patents makes them more akin to recipes than to algorithms. An algorithm is a universal mathematical truth proven from fundamental axioms. A recipe seems to kind of work, in the context of the physical world. And that difference means there is much more room for innovation in a recipe than in an algorithm: while algorithms are often proven to be either optimal or within a given bounds of optimality, recipes have such a broad, unexplored, uncharacterized parameter space that big surprises can lie in wait. And patents were originally a way of rewarding such exploration of mechanical recipes.
Dude, seriously, read up on electroweak theory. You're so 1960's.
Why not? The Greeks didn't know Calculus. Taking their advice on infinite anything is a bad idea. Zeno managed to "prove" that time doesn't flow forward, because an infinite regress was "impossible" and motion is an infinite regress of infinitesimals because you can always cut both distance and time into halves. Why can't the universe be changing and yet without a beginning?
NSL didn't arise from nothing, because each child involved had communicated with their parents via home sign systems, knew written Spanish, and were being trained in lipreading of spoken Spanish. NSL first developed as a pidgin of their individual home signs, and then developed into a full creole language. Without the home signs, the pidgin never would've formed in the first place, and influence from written Spanish might have shaped the language in very significant ways.
Oh, and despite all that, I'm a cheerful optimist.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the crankiest crankery I've ever seen cranked.
I actually obliquely referenced this in my post, when I said "And as flawed as that 'proof' is, it's more proof than you offer for your baseless assertions about Gödel's incompleteness theorems." I'm quite aware that there are many nebulous ideas about the soul that disclaim all testable predictions and are thus impossible to prove one way or another.
Sure, the idea's been done before, notably by Descartes and his wild-a** guessing about the pineal gland. But there's the deeper question of what the soul does. The more we discover about the materialist workings of the brain, the less mysterious thoughts become, and the result is that Interactionism is gradually giving way to Epiphenomenalism: where the "soul" experiences the body's sensations but only erroneously believes that it has control over the body, as it just happens by coincidence that (through purely materialistic means) the body acts as the soul independently had willed.
I'm essentially arguing that the "soul" is a attribution error. Ancient peoples saw leaves rustling in the wind and, having no knowledge of high pressure systems or the ideal gas law, they assumed that an intelligent higher being must've caused the wind. So they invented gods to explain wind, and whatever emotional effect the wind happened to have on them was explained as a message from the gods.
Likewise, modern religious people see their fellow humans thinking intelligently and having self-aware philosophical thoughts and, having no knowledge of how the underlying neurons and brain chemistry bring about this state of affairs, they assume that an intelligent higher being must've put some kind of magical animating force (i.e. a "soul") inside each individual to make them intelligent and unique.
The problem: the pro-soul crowd can't come up with a good explanation for who or what has a soul, or how you can spot one. Most say that humans, and humans alone, have souls. Some say that higher primates have souls, but not fish. Others say every physical thing has a soul, up to and including places. None of them can sort anything out or come to any sort of agreement — and don't even bring up AIs or Turing tests. To me, the whole thing looks like the proverbial "angels on the head of a pin" debate.
What's more, even though they all agree that humans seem to have them, they can't agree on when humans get them. Catholics are fond of saying that the soul is inserted at the moment of fertilization — but that would mean homozygous twins share a single soul, which contradicts their belief that the soul is eternal and indivisible. Others believe that the soul gets inserted at some later point — some cultures have held that the soul grows and isn't even fully formed until adulthood.
If you ask me, though, all the thinking about "souls" is misplaced. They're personalities, not souls; they're physical, not spiritual; they're mortal, not eternal; and they don't survive death.
For one: in many cases, there isn't an answer. Take Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Zermelo was surprised that a certain statement wasn't true in ZF set theory, so he formulated the Axiom of Choice ("Every set has a choice function"), which was later proven to be independent of the ZF axioms.
Choice makes a certain amount of intuitive sense... except that it leads to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which doesn't. But the absence of Choice means that you can't pick a real number from the real number line, because at best you'll pick a computable number — and the set of computable numbers is only countably infinite, which is far smaller than the uncountably infinite real numbers. So, if Choice is false, the real numbers don't exist. That doesn't make much sense, either.
Bullshit. The only thing Gödel's incompleteness theorems prove is that no knowledge, not even human knowledge or even a deity's knowledge, can be both consistent and complete. Human beings are so ridiculously inconsistent that completeness doesn't even enter into the picture and Gödel doesn't apply.
Alzheimer's is proof by counterexample that souls don't exist. Ever had a relative die of Alzheimer's? My grandmother died of the fast-acting, early-onset form. She was symptomatic in her late 40s and was barely 50 when she was diagnosed. Within 5 years she was behaving like a hypersexed sullen teenager, after 7 years she completely lost the ability to speak a grammatically correct sentence, and 9 years in she died as a bedridden zombie incapable of chewing and swallowing her own food. Her "soul" died piece by piece before my family's eyes, leaving first a wild animal with the power of speech (in the form of babble), and then only an empty husk of a body. The "soul" is divisible, and physical disease can kill it piecemeal by attacking the brain. Therefore, the "soul" is a physical part of the brain. And as flawed as that "proof" is, it's more proof than you offer for your baseless assertions about Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
That was after they'd managed to coat it in Democrat-friendly concessions. The first vote, on the bill itself sans riders, is the vote that actually reveals what the Democrats felt about it.
(While coating bad-tasting legislation in candied earmarks is a time-"honored" US tradition, it's not fixable so long as we're using a voting system vulnerable to Duverger's Law. Two parties is not enough competition to stop riders.)
I'll be the first to admit that the Republicans don't deserve all the blame here. The Democrats were quite gung ho for leaving Fannie and Freddie unfettered by oversight, which put them in the no-mans land of being government-sponsored yet largely unregulated — a recipe for abuse. In particular, Barney Frank's refusal to face reality and admit his mistakes has been an embarrassment to me — as a gay man, a Democrat, and an American.
That said, The Republicans held absolute control over the House for a solid 12-year stretch from 1995 to 2007, and they ran the Senate for the same period minus a two-year gap (2001-2003) when they were merely tied. From the Netscape IPO to the Paulson bailout, the last two economic crises happened on their watch. Also, while the Republicans love pointing to Democratic support for the CRA, the CRA is largely a non-issue — institutions subject to CRA rules have had lower default rates than the rest of the mortgage industry, and it's high time the Republicans stopped crying about it and quit trying to punt their share of blame. While it's not all their fault, they did seek and accept the power, and with the power comes the responsibility — and thus the blame when things go wrong.
There's no need to blame the Democrats for the dot-com or housing crises. Now that they hold the power, I'm sure that the popularity of neo-Keynesian ideas among the Democrats will brew up a shiny new crisis that properly belongs to them. (Which is probably going to be even more spectacular than the current one: the next one will probably include hyperinflation and the total collapse of the US dollar, especially if the Democrats go through with their plan for a second stimulus package but fail to raise taxes to pay for it. The Republicans ought to be happy that they've stepped aside, because they're dodging a bullet on this one.)