It's a shame more people don't realize how equally-lousy Clinton was. He's responsible for a whole mess of things, like the dot-com crash of 2000, the failure to increase U.S. border security to prevent 9/11, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that brought-down multiple banks.
The dot-com crash was only Clinton's responsibility in the sense that Clinton didn't fire Greenspan. Greenspan caused the dot-com boom/bust when he cut rates to inflate his way out of the 1980's S&L scandal and the subsequent 1991 recession. Monetarism — the idea that the government should price-fix credit by artificially limiting interest rates — was thoroughly embraced by Republicans, then and now, and Greenspan's adherence to it was the very reason Reagan appointed him. Clinton's work toward balancing the budget and paying down the deficit probably limited the growth rate of the bubble and helped prevent the crash from being a bigger mess than it could've been. (Not that Clinton was consciously embracing Austrian economics or the like. But he had the common sense that it's a bad thing to spend money you don't have, which both the Keynesians and the Monetarists have repeatedly refused to learn. Of course, Republican contrariness helped a lot — I doubt that Clinton would've had that kind of fiscal discipline if both the House and Senate had been Democrat-controlled.)
On border security... the 9/11 hijackers all entered the US under their own names, with genuine Saudi Arabian passports, and had been granted genuine US visas to live here legally. Either they should have been spotted and stopped during the visa approval phase, or the FBI and other agencies should've caught and arrested them after they had incriminated themselves within US borders (as the agencies came painfully close to doing). Customs agents at an airport aren't in a position to single people out and accuse them of having long-term terroristic intentions. Nor are they equipped to deal with the subtle passport fraud employed by the hijackers to hide which countries they'd visited recently. Border guards are even more irrelevant to terrorism — the 9/11 hijackers didn't enter the US through Canada or Mexico, and no amount of added security on the Canadian and Mexican borders would've stopped them since they didn't even pass through those borders.
Regarding the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act... the Act had Republican fingerprints all over it. Gramm, Leach, and Bliley were all Republicans; it was passed along partisan lines (Senate Republicans: 53-0, Senate Democrats: 1-44; House: uncounted voice vote, which the Democrat minority didn't feel a need to contest); and Bill Clinton signed it for... actually, I don't know why Bill Clinton signed it, but the bastard signed the Defense of Marriage Act, too, so it's not like "Bill Clinton signed a piece of legislature" means that the piece of legislature was actually supported by Democrats.
More than all that, Clinton didn't get us into any conflicts until there was an international outcry for intervention, and he generally conducted foreign policy in a way that was, at worst, adequate. He kept an eye on Iraq without engaging in any of GWB's blustery rhetoric and sabre-rattling, much less actually invading it with ground troops, and he put CIA attention on Al-Qaeda and bin Laden even before the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, then stepped up scrutiny afterward.
All in all, I can't understand why Clinton is so reviled by Republicans. The Monica thing was unfortunate, but nothing worse than the (then unknown) adulterous peccadilloes of the very Republican congressmen who were so keen on having Clinton's head. The Republican uproar over Bosnia, and their shouts of "wag the dog", seem quaint
... The more I think about it, the more I feel like I was too cocky in shooting from the hip in this post.
Gold, silver, copper, oil: still yes. They retain value during inflation because the government can't print more of them.
Bonds: still no. Bonds will keep pace with inflation at best, and yield less than inflation if government doesn't start raising taxes and cutting debt, stat.
Foreign market investment: still yes. Countries with more fiscally responsible monetary policies will experience a greater proportion of non-inflationary genuine economic growth, which means their currencies will devalue less in absolute terms (i.e. relative to commodities), which means their currencies will appraise in relation to USD.
Stocks:.... There will be winners and losers as a new bubble grows, and a sudden shift as the bubble pops, but I think I need to digest more Austrian economics before I fully grok who the winners will be at each stage.
Oh, and jumping back to strong-currency countries, their exports will soon do quite handsomely due to the time lag between US price inflation and US dollar devaluation. US exports will only strengthen much later in the cycle, after the US dollar has taken the devaluation hit. (Again, only true if Bernanke and Paulson can get their inflationary consumption bubble expanding again. It seems likely to me that they can squeeze about one more round out of the Ponzi-go-round before they crash it so hard that they need to revalue the USD.)
So if you want a short-term investment, skip the gold and go for foreign exporters or US importers. The stronger the foreign currency is versus the USD, the faster and hotter the action will be, up until Bernanke hikes interest rates to "cool off" the economy and the USD monetary inflation slows down.
It's not "unbacked" unless you consider treasury bills to junk bonds. Most of the world is buying them as the only safe investment that they can find.
T-bills don't represent economic value. You might claim that they represent the value collected by government taxation, or maybe go off into some delusion that the government gets to double-count the value of GDP, but in reality the government pays for interest on bonds by issuing more bonds, not by raising taxes, which means bonds are ultimately unbacked except by currency devaluation.
Buy high, sell low? Right now I'd probably buy some reverse index funds. In a month, I'd start buying some of this incredibly discounted stock.
No -- buy now, sell later. Gold has just dropped some $300 and might very well drop another $200 in the short term, putting it more in line with historic gold-growth:CPI ratios in the $500-$600 range. But massive amounts of monetary inflation are happening right now due to the "rescue" activities, so a return to a gold uptrend is inevitable on the scale of, say, the next 10 years.
Actually, thinking about it, more base commodities like copper and oil futures are probably a better buy than gold itself. Oil has the benefit that it'll probably pay off sooner, due the likelihood that we're at or past peak oil. There's so much buyer attention on gold and silver right now that the less glamorous stuff like copper will have the better deals. But gold will still be a massive win compared to USD itself or USD T-bills, especially with T-bill yields as low as they are, and gold will be competitive with stocks in US-based companies that don't run on exports. (Unless, of course, you feel like gambling that you can anticipate the pop of the next stock bubble, which itself involves the gamble that Bernanke and Paulson can get another bubble started before spinning the US into Germany-style hyperinflation as they desperately try to prime the Ponzi scheme pump. That's what they get for trying to price-fix credit.)
All that said: stocks in US-based companies that do most of their business in exports, OTOH, will likely give better returns than gold, if you pick the right ones, so 100% gold is clearly stupid. And, if you can find a country that's not busy "coordinating" interest rate cuts and "stimulating" their way out of fiscal responsibility -- a rare thing these days -- then that country's economy ought to be a healthy, non-bubbley investment.
We are not suffering tremendous inflation, which is how you would expect to be bitten by deficit spending.
What do you call the housing bubble, the oil bubble, the commodity bubble, the food bubble,...? They popped, for now, but the government is busy pumping massive amounts of unbacked money into the system (see: $700 billion bailout, 1% federal funds rate,...) on top of the deficit spending in Iraq, and rest assured that all of this unbacked spending will cause yet another "boom" (i.e. inflationary price bubble). At this point, it's a coin flip on whether the current policies will result in an economy like 1990's Japan or like 1920's Germany, but the inevitable end game of the current Ponzi scheme will be one or the other of those two outcomes. (My penny's on Germany -- the US doesn't have a high enough savings rate to sustain a Japan.)
I just wish I had money to invest in gold right now, before the next bubble starts.
Why? Why should someone making more pay more? That has never made sense to me. Not even a little bit.
The idea is "marginal utility". Let's imagine two people, Foo and Bar.
First, Foo. Foo is single and works as an overnight Wal-mart stocker living in Wichita, KS. He earns $10/hr in pre-tax wages, which is about $400/week, $1800/month, or $20000/year. Multiply by 0.70 to subtract out 30% income tax, which cuts that income from $1800/month pre-tax to $1260/month take-home. Subtract rent, which runs around $450/month in Wichita, and Foo now has $810/month. Subtract out basic utilities (water, natural gas, electricity), which comes to about $300/month during the summer (Kansas has a stretch in August where the highs break 100F daily -- people die every year from heatstroke due to a lack of air conditioning), leaving Foo with $510/month. Subtract a 7.3% sales tax, and Foo is down to $472.77. Now Foo can spend that $472.77 on groceries to feed himself, gasoline to drive to work (WMTA public transit being worse than useless), car insurance and registration, and any optional utilities, like a telephone or TV. If Foo is smart and rents a place within a mile or two of work, then he might be able to eke out an existence. Foo is in the sort-of grey area between "working poor" and "lower middle class", but much closer to "working poor".
Now, Bar. Bar is single and works as a programmer at Google for a salary in the ballpark of $75000/year while living in San Francisco, CA. Thus, Bar makes $6250/month pre-tax. Multiply by 0.70 to subtract out 30% income tax, which cuts that to $4375/month. Subtract rent, which in San Francisco will run you from $1600/month to $2400/month for a studio or 1-bedroom. We'll call it $2000/month for a 1 bedroom, which brings Bar's post-tax, post-rent income down to $2375/month. Subtract utilities, which are roughly the same price in San Francisco as they are in Wichita (slightly more expensive rates, but no air conditioning), which brings it to $2075/month. Subtract an 8.5% sales tax (which incorrectly assumes Bar is spending all his income), and what's left is $1898.62/month for food, gasoline (if any -- SF Muni is annoying but functional), and any optional utilities (which are about the same price as they are in Wichita). Bar can easily get by -- it doesn't even qualify as eking, even though he pays more than 4 times as much rent as Foo but earns less than 4 times as much income. His overall expenses are smaller in proportion to his income. Bar, in contrast to Foo, is clearly middle class... due to the marginal utility of money.
Now imagine a flat 3% income tax hike. Foo's post-utility, post-sales-tax income -- which still needs to pay for food, gas, and any discretional spending -- has dropped from $472.77 to $422.71, a drop of about $50. Bar's post-utility, post-sales-tax income has dropped from $1898.62/month to $1727.06/month, a drop of about $172. Despite the fact that Bar took a much larger income hit than Foo in absolute terms, and an equal hit in percentage terms, Foo has taken the larger hit in terms of the utility of money.
Suppose Foo had previously been spending $60/week ($270/month) on food, $60/month on gasoline (assuming $3.00/gallon), $67/month amortized on registration/insurance, and $80/month on a cellphone. Now Foo needs to find a place in his budget to subtract $50/month. He could give up the cellphone, thus (a) removing his primary connection to his family, (b) removing his ability to make emergency calls, including to tell work that he won't make it in tonight so please don't fire him as no-call/no-show, and (c) destroying his ability to find a better job, because everyone expects a potential employee to have a contact phone number. Dropping from a cellphone to a landline would only save $30/month or so. He could give up the car, thus (a) forcing him to walk to work, thus wasting 2 hours a day, or $450/month in value, (b) removing his ability to drive himself to the
Then please explain why a boom-bust cycle exists in such simple things like say, a bacterial colony?
Well, that's easy enough: the bacterial environment changes somehow, which shifts the carrying capacity, which then follows the laws of Population Dynamics to reach the new carrying capacity.
99% of the time, when you're dealing with a pure bacterial culture in isolation, the reason for the environment change is simple evolution: a new strain of bacterium arises through recombination and/or mutation, and the new strain is Darwinistically fitter than the old dominant strain. ("Darwinistically fitter" is, of course, in the context of the current environment... which includes the behaviors and population sizes of both the old and new strains, meaning it is not an absolute scale.) Since the new strain is superior in context, it replaces the old strain. Compared to the old strain, the new strain might be more efficient at using food, in which case the population is definitely below capacity; or it might be less efficient at using food, in which case the population is quite likely above capacity. (A strain that was less efficient might nonetheless be superior — if it developed, for example, the ability to poison its cousins and eat their tasty, tasty corpses as they died. Mmm, braiiiins.)
Whatever the reasons for the changing environment, evolutionary or not, Population Dynamics now kicks in. If the colony is below capacity, it grows exponentially, shoots past the new capacity, and its growth evens out as it finds itself above capacity. Once the colony is above capacity, the growth rate turns negative, a die-off follows, the colony's population plummets below the carrying capacity, and growth evens out again, thus closing the loop. Due to the equations involved, though, the population's distance from carrying capacity feeds back into the growth rates — in such a way that the oscillations gradually dampen out with each swing. In the limit of Time->+Infinity the population would exactly reach the new carrying capacity. (Unless at some point the population had crashed hard enough to reach 0, in which case the whole colony will be extinct. But since this is a single colony and not a predator-prey dynamic, that could only happen on the first swing downward.)
Human economics doesn't work like bacterial colonies, though, because human economies are not colonies of monoclonal, single-strain businesses with identical strategies. As with bacteria, businesses are constantly being "born" and "dying", but unlike bacteria a business can respond to its environment with more subtle choices than death versus stasis versus self-cloning. The result is that, while businesses are in a constant state of flux around a constantly-shifting carrying capacity in the "economic ecology", there is no naturally-occurring opportunity for those fluctuations to balloon to the boom-bust proportions we see in the modern economic world: their natural behavior is to dampen, and dampen quickly.
Changes in bacterial strategy shift over the course of generations of bacteria, which gives the oscillations enough time to do their work: the bacteria respond to the present environment, without predicting the future environment, and they can't change their patterns of behavior without rewriting their DNA via evolution. In contrast, changes in business strategy are capable of occurring over the course of weeks or months, far shorter than the lifetime of a business. Because businesses don't have their strategies hard-coded into DNA, they can predict what's coming and let go of maladaptive strategies much more quickly, without dying. They can thus respond to the changing "ecology" rapidly enough to slow down the overcorrections past equilibrium, in both directions, and they thus approach equilibrium far more quickly than bacteria d
The boom-bust cycle is a feature of human economics throughout history, and it won't change.
Not really, no. When Marx was making the observations that led to the Communist Manifesto, he saw the rise of the boom-bust business cycle during the Industrial Revolution as proof that laissez faire capitalism — a new thing at the time — was a fundamentally flawed system that would be replaced with his Glorious Communist Revolution(TM). That is, laissez faire capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, AND the boom-bust cycle appeared at roughly the same time, so Marx (and many others) assumed they were all part of the same thing.
What Marx and others missed was that the newly-risen boom-bust cycle wasn't a property of capitalism itself, but rather a property of fractional reserve banking, which was one of the many new forms of fraud to arise in the newly-born free market that was still learning to police itself. When banks kept fractional reserves, they invented money out of thin air by loaning out money that didn't belong to them. In fact, each bank printed its own bank notes, which were notionally worth a given amount of gold, but frequently worth far less. As the banks loaned out un-backed bank notes — bogus IOUs for gold — they created speculative investment bubbles that looked like a good thing at first, but ultimately caused local price inflation within that bank's sphere of influence. As people tried to buy cheaper items from outside the bank's sphere of influence, in other regions of the country, third party banks tried to cash in on the bogus IOUs that they'd been given, draining the inflationary bank's gold reserves. When word got out that the inflationary bank was low on gold, it imploded in a bank run, while reality reasserted itself by bringing prices back down.
When Marx made his observations, few countries had a central bank at the time, so individual private banks could only drive relatively small and localized bubbles within their respective spheres of influence. Smarter banks only leveraged themselves out at a small enough ratio, like 2:1, so that they could survive a run and would not be depleted too badly by other banks cashing in IOUs — gambling that other banks would run at the same or greater leverage, on average. Dumb banks burned themselves out with stupendous amounts of leverage — but, so long as they burned so very brightly, they looked like a benefit to the community, despite the rising prices, because they gave out loans to so many people.
Later, by the early 20th century, banks started cooperating in a centralized manner, allowing them to coordinate their inflationary activities and prevent reality from asserting itself by combining into a single, limitless sphere of influence that simultaneously enveloped an entire country with lockstep inflation. By joining forces, they could keep the bubble growing bigger and lasting longer, with the ultimate goal of making the bubble grow forever. After a series of false starts during the 1910s, they seemingly succeeded at their goal: the Roaring '20s, which at the time were hailed as a new era of prosperity. The bubble grew so big and lasted so long that, when the Ponzi scheme inevitably came crashing down, the result was the Great Depression.
I've read my history. The gold standard places a dangerous deflationary bias in place on economies, often turning recessions into much more dangerous depressions. Anyone advocating such a policy has NOT read any history worth reading.
Why would deflation be dangerous? Inflation is a regressive tax in disguise — because inflation has a time lag, the money-creating loans given out by fractional reserve banks benefit those who directly receive the loans, but when they spend that loaned money it drives up prices for everyone else. The people on fixed incomes, like retirees, suffer the most.
Deflation is only dangerous if you believe in the broken window fallacy — that people should blindly consume, consume, consume to drive up the GDP (and join the Ponzi scheme until the next time it pops) rather than saving their money until they can invest it wisely.
Do you believe that a barter system has a dangerously deflationary bias? Because gold is nothing more than a refinement of the barter system, and when the US dollar collapses in an orgy of hyperinflation, a barter system will be the only workable choice.
If the FDIC goes tits-up, then we reach the end game of the fractional reserve banking system: the government prints money to bail out the FDIC, because that's also "too big to fail", which triggers an inevitable hyperinflationary meltdown that brings about the end of the US dollar. And Shiva dances, or something.
Gold is useless except as decoration. It only has value because people have been conditioned to think it does.
Not really. Gold has value as decoration (and in various industrial processes, and as an electrical conductor, and...) PLUS it's fungible (two halves of a gold bar is just as valuable as a whole gold bar) PLUS it's stable (gold mining happens at a predictable pace) PLUS it's rare enough that it has concentrated value (a small amount is worth a lot, even for the decorative value alone) PLUS it's impossible to forge or counterfeit, even by a government (i.e. it's inflation-proof).
How much of that can be said about little bits of green paper?
The situation needs to be restructured so that only the government can borrow or loan money for the purchasing of anything other than real assets.
Oh, no no no no no, don't even joke about that, much less mean it. I'm a lefty Democrat living in San Francisco who thinks the Libertarians are a bit wacky for arguing against socialized health care and who thinks that the solution to the current crisis is tighter regulation. But don't give the government even greater opportunity to hold a legal monopoly on counterfeiting money (which is what inflation fundamentally is). Banks loaning money, even to investors and speculators, is not the problem. Banks fraudulently loaning out money that they don't own is the problem, which isn't merely legal but is all but required for banks participating in the Federal Reserve system. (And, if you hadn't guessed, Participation Is Mandatory, Citizen.)
Fractional reserve banking, orchestrated by the Fed's interest rate cuts, is what got us into this mess. When the Fed cuts rates, commercial banks borrow more money from the Fed to replenish their reserves, knowing that they can pay it back later and still pocket a profit. Since they operate at a legally mandated 10:1 reserve ratio, every $1 borrowed from the Fed allows them to "create" $10 worth of new loans to businesses, home buyers... and, yes, speculators. All of the loan recipients — including the speculators, but not limited to them — drive up prices and create a bubble. However, the bubble must ultimately pop because money has increased but value has not.
Greenspan cut the rate in 2001-2004 to "stimulate" our way out of the Dot Com bust, thus creating the housing bubble. The Dot Com bubble itself was also due to Greenspan, who cut the rate in 1991-1994 to "stimulate" us out of the Savings & Loan bust... which was just in time for Yahoo's 1996 IPO. And so on, going back right through the Great Depression and the Roaring '20s, all the way back to the unregulated private banks of the 1800s, who created localized boom-bust cycles if they kept only fractional reserves but put themselves at risk of a bank run (the market's response to fraud) and were frequently driven out of business by the angry mobs. (Among the "good" banks, few truly kept a 1:1 ratio because loaning out money only from within your profits takes a huge amount of discipline. But a "good" bank would voluntarily limit itself to e.g. 2:1 because of its fear of bank runs. And a 2:1 ratio was usually enough reserves to placate the angry mob and prevent an implosion.)
On top of all that, inflation is a regressive tax in disguise: because of the time delay between invented money and rising prices, those who touch the money first will extract the benefit from it, and those who touch the money last will instead suffer from rising prices. Since the ultra-rich touch the money far sooner than Joe Random Wal-mart Associate, and Jane Random Retired Widow never touches it, the net result is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. This makes it clear why Republicans are so slow to badmouth the Fed — the Fed is funneling money to their ultra-rich buddies and single-handedly creating the vast majority of the wealth gap.
If you take away the middle man and give the Fed even more direct power, the last fig leaf on the system will be blown away and the final round of the Ponzi scheme will crash hard enough to hyperinflate the dollar and trash the US economy for decades.
The dot com movement was the vaporware of economic booms, all promise and no production.
That's not really fair to the Dot Com boom. All booms are vaporware. The Fed cuts interest rates to get out of a bust, which drives up monetary inflation because of fractional-reserve banking. Because money is suddenly more plentiful due to cheap credit, a shiny new boom appears. But the boom drives up prices, turning monetary inflation into price inflation. When that hidden inflation finally hits consumers in the wallet, the Ponzi scheme falls apart and a bust begins. Rinse and repeat.
The boom-bust cycle has nothing to do with the stock market. The stock market and boom-bust cycles are both far older than merely 20 years; Marx was complaining about the boom-bust cycle in the mid-1800s.
According to the Austrian School of economics, the boom-bust cycle is caused by inflation and fractional-reserve banking. (1) The Fed cuts interest rates to stimulate the economy. (2) Banks borrow more cash from the Fed. (3) Banks loan out 10 times as much cash as the amount they just borrowed from the Fed — maintaining a 10:1 fractional reserve. (4) Businesses see easier loans and lower interest rates, so they invest in more equipment in anticipation of future growth. (5) The manufacturers of the equipment in Step 4 profit, so they pass some of that on to their workers. (6) The workers from Step 5, happy with their current savings, spend their new profits. (7) The increased consumer spending increases investor confidence, driving up the stock market. (8) The extra money from Step 6 cycles through the economy a few times, driving up prices and making the hidden inflation from Step 3 become obvious. (9) The Fed hikes rates to "cool off" the economy and "fight" inflation. (10) The higher prices make consumers realize that their current savings aren't worth as much as they used to be, so they cut back on spending and save more. (11) The sales expected in Step 4 fail to materialize — at least, not to the degree expected — but interest rates are now rising, so the equipment bought during the boom turns out to be a money-losing bad investment. (12) Stocks crash as investors pull their money out of the businesses that got pinched by inflation. (1) The Fed cuts interest rates to stimulate the economy....
If the government throws money at the problem, e.g. by passing a $700 billion bailout without raising taxes by an equal amount, the result is more inflation. The extra spending might trigger another boom that temporarily hides the bust, but the hike in inflation risks a crucial third transition in the financial reasoning of consumers: instead of alternating between "wow, I have lots of money" and "wow, my money isn't worth much", the risk is that consumers will perceive that inflation is happening at a fast enough rate that cash is dangerous to own. The result is that consumers spend everything, including their savings, in the hopes of buying durable goods that they'll be able to resell or barter later. This is hyperinflation, which is where Germany went after World War I and where Zimbabwe is today... and it looks increasingly like the US dollar will go there in the not-too-distant future, especially if the FDIC runs out of cash-on-hand like they're in serious danger of doing right now.
I'm not sure we can really assume many of the things you listed. For example, 2 and 3 would seem to be contradictory.
Not really. No thing can travel faster than the speed of light, but spacetime is a metric (a numbering system), not a thing. When Hubble's was first proposed, this was thoroughly hashed out: new space continuously appears inbetween any two points A and B. If A and B are sufficiently distant, then enough new space accumulates such that 1 light-year or more of it appears between A and B over the course of 1 year, and thus A and B become causally disconnected... even without inflation. Inflationary Big Bang theory just does the same thing, only faster (i.e. "sufficiently distant" was measured in tiny fractions of a meter, rather than light-years). It's not a contradiction of General Relativity any more than the Alcubierre warp drive (albeit Hubble expansion has the property of actually existing).
We still don't know what caused inflation to happen, and there's nothing to say it isn't still active (albeit, a little less active than earlier) in moving these galaxies.
True that we don't know what caused inflation, but the fact that it stopped suddenly means that whatever was driving it is "done". String Theorists seem to think it's due to some sort of spring-like tension tied up in the compacted higher dimensions of space that we normally don't notice, and that inflation was when three of them somehow uncoiled and sprung loose into the universe we know today. I've heard speculation that more spatial dimensions might similarly spring loose at some point in the future, and further speculation that that's what's causing Dark Energy (acceleration of the Hubble expansion). But I know even less about String Theory than I do about GR, so I'm probably just embarrassing myself at this point.
And if space is allowed to travel faster than light then, unless I'm misunderstanding something, surely light taking a roundabout route could go through a fast-moving patch of space and arrive here sooner than light taking a geodesic... right?
In Hubble expansion, space itself isn't moving in the sense of going from A to B. Again, space is a metric, not a thing, so it can't "move" at all. Hubble expansion is completely uniform: pick any two points of space, measure the distance with a beam of light, and you will find that the distance increases over time, and that the rate of increase is larger if A and B are farther away. (Although if there are objects at A and B, and the two points are sufficiently close, gravitational or electromagnetic attraction will pull the objects together faster than the Hubble expansion can pull them apart, causing the objects to leave points A and B behind.)
Things are different in the Alcubierre metric, since the Alcubierre metric is non-homogenous, but that involves exotic matter (imaginary mass, negative mass-squared) so, just like wormholes, Alcubierre metrics don't seem to actually exist.
No, fertilization isn't when a baby is created: it's a possible ancestor cell of one or more babies... or of a hydatiform mole that kills the mother without an abortion, but whatever. We wouldn't be having this moronic discussion if humans didn't use DNA methylation to turn off stem cell activity and thus could reproduce by budding or cuttings like plants can -- exfoliation would literally be murder by your worldview.
And, in fact, if scientists ever discover how to turn a differentiated adult human cell into a totipotent stem cell (i.e. capable of becoming a fetus), then exfoliation will be murder, because every skin cell is a possible ancestor cell of one or more babies as well, just like a fertilized egg.
You're one of those fucking freaks who's going to be convinced some day that some people don't have souls (e.g. sold it to Satan, or got possessed by demons, or descended from So-and-So child of Adam or Noah or whoever), and therefore it's OK to hurt or kill them, because even though they sound like they're in pain, they're not really in pain and it's not really a sin.
Let's start with a recap of some statements that are true under current physical theories: (1) space itself is expanding (Hubble Expansion); (2) early in the history of the universe, the expansion of space was faster than the speed of light (Inflationary Big Bang theory); (3) nothing can exceed the speed of light, not even gravity or information (Special and General Relativity); and (4) we are confined our "observable universe": a bubble 92 billion light-years in diameter (General Relativity plus Inflationary Big Bang theory — 13.7 billion light-years, plus inflation, plus 13.7 billion years of Hubble expansion).
Given these facts, neither gravity nor information from outside our observable universe can enter it.
Sure, parts of what we currently consider the observable universe might, in their own relativistic timeline, be "currently" experiencing a gravitational tug from parts of the universe that we can't currently observe, even in principle. However, if that is true, then either (a) such observable places will exit our field of observation before we observe that gravitational tug (i.e. the universe will expand faster than light), or (b) such unobservable places exerting a gravitational tug will enter our field of observation before we see the tug on things we can currently see (i.e. the universe will expand slower than light).
There's no way that information could take a roundabout path to us and arrive faster than information traveling in a straight line (or, more correctly in GR, a geodesic). Think about it: if light/gravity/information cannot travel directly to us, because the direct path is too long and too slow, how could it travel indirectly to us? The indirect path is, by definition, longer and slower than the direct path.
I suppose that, if a large mass was once observable but now is not (i.e. it tugged on some galaxies, then inflation happened), the theory in the article might make a certain amount of sense. But the timescale of inflation (fractions of a second after the Big Bang) doesn't really leave a lot of time for that to happen. It sounds much more plausible to my ears that either (a) there is a previously-undiscovered conglomeration of dark matter in that direction, but it still lies within our observable bubble; or (b) the galaxies in question are at high velocity but no longer accelerating, indicating leftover momentum from an ejection, collision, or some other high-energy event in the early universe.
OTOH, I'm no physicist, so maybe I'm missing something, or maybe the actual theory being promoted makes more sense than Space.com's rather awful writeup.
So, in your quest to relieve your conscience or the conscience of others you can attempt to rationalize out what constitutes a person. In so doing you rationalize away your humanity. We are not simple animals to be dealt with as one would a kitten or a pig. Human life demands more respect than that of a common farm animal and a developing baby isn't a tadpole to be scooped up and flushed away.
Oh, and yes, obviously vacuuming out a small blob of cells with no nerves, no brain, and no ability to feel pain is clearly a far more enormous moral violation, a greater shock to the conscience, than disposing of an animal...
NEW YORK (AP) -- Trial has begun for a baseball player-turned-actor accused of brutally killing a cat in a jealous rage after complaining that his ex-girlfriend cared more for the furry feline than she did for him.
Assistant District Attorney Leila Kermani said the cat named Norman died with broken teeth, broken ribs, a broken leg, a torn tongue, massive internal injuries including bruised lungs and a bruised liver and a chest cavity filled with blood.
"The defendant, in a fit of anger and rage, beat a defenseless animal to death," Kermani told the jury in her opening remarks Wednesday. "The defendant killed Norman simply because he was an angry, jealous and drunken bully."
Former New York Mets minor leaguer Joseph Petcka, 37, is on trial on charges of aggravated cruelty to animals for killing Norman on March 27, 2007, after a night of heavy drinking. He faces up to two years in prison if convicted.
Yup, even though that cat had a brain and nerves and the ability to suffer greatly before it died alone and despairing, at least Petcka didn't perform a first-trimester abortion!
Ask yourself what makes a person for the rest of your life and it won't change the fact that once conception occurs that a life has been created. Left unmolested those cells become a child.
Or a miscarriage, or a tubal pregnancy that kills the mother, or a hydatiform mole that spreads throughout her body like cancer, or choriocarcinoma which actually is a cancer, or an anencephalic fetus that dies in the womb and starts rotting the mother from the inside out...
I simply cannot find a more definitive point at which 'life' begins than at conception. It has nothing to do with my religion, but it is the most logical point at which you can say "Before that point, it was definitely not a human" and after that point "If we do not interfere, it will become a human". I've tried to rationalize abortion by looking at different stages of pregnancy, but I cannot find, or it hasn't yet been identified, that there is a singular event that bridges alive and not alive. Conception, is the most definitive point.
See, now, when I look at the stages of pregnancy, I see fertilization as "large cell plus tiny wannabe-cell equals large cell", not some sort of dramatic change worthy of special treatment... much less a supernatural event where a hidden deity sneaks a soul in, as claimed by the religious folks. This view is validated by the fact that a single fertilization can readily lead to two (or hypothetically more) resulting embryos, resulting in multiple unique individuals with identical DNA. This tells me that DNA is not really central to what it means to be an individual, unique person. Therefore, the moment when two haploid genomes join into a diploid genome isn't a particularly good moment to start saying that a cell has become a person.
Instead, I ask myself the question: what makes a person a person? And my answer is that a person (1) reacts to the surrounding environment; (2) remembers the past, learns from it, and makes predictions from it; and (3) has a personality, which seems to be a second-order effect of established memory plus genetic biases. (Yes, by this standard, many animals count as "persons". I'm not terribly concerned about that: in this context of "person", I'm concerned with how to treat a person ethically, and it's clear that animals with these traits must also be treated ethically.) And it's obvious to me that, while some of these things start while the fetus is in the womb — certainly the first, and the beginnings of the second — they definitely don't start until after the embryo has become a fetus, and based on how the brain works they definitely don't start prior to the formation of the human-style frontal cortex around weeks 22-26.
As a result, I don't see any moral issues whatsoever in abortion in the first trimester or the early second trimester, for the same reason I don't see moral issues in masturbation or exfoliation or hysterectomies. The bigger moral concern is the emotional well-being of the mother. Pregnancy is a big deal, after all: the choices surrounding pregnancy — abortion included — take on a very weighty importance due to their massively life-changing consequences.
Kind of a bad example. Penrose is a mathematician who focuses on big-picture physics (relativity and cosmology). Beyond his speculation on "quantum consciousness", he is not recognized as an expert in either neuroscience or quantum mechanics. I put as much stock in Penrose talking about consciousness as I would in a neurosurgeon talking about his pet sub-theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
In the US, there are basically three effects from declaring a party affiliation: (1) you are permitted to vote in that party's primaries, (2) you receive targeted political junk mail, and (3) you show up in state-released statistics on how many registered voters there are for each party. Primary election rules vary by both party and state: in some states you don't even need to register with a party to vote in its primary, so in those states declaring a party is almost pointless.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
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Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
Oh, just to be clear, each running copy of Firefox needs a separate profile. If you fail to give the subsequent copies of Firefox unique profiles, you get a confusing but protective "Firefox is not responding" message. If that check weren't there, they would corrupt the profile (history, cookies, bookmarks, prefs.js, yadda) as they both tried writing to it.
You can start Firefox with "-ProfileManager" to open the Profile Manager window, and you can use "-P <profile-name>" (in combination with "--no-remote") to use specified profiles. Great for keeping a profile just for online banking, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
The dot-com crash was only Clinton's responsibility in the sense that Clinton didn't fire Greenspan. Greenspan caused the dot-com boom/bust when he cut rates to inflate his way out of the 1980's S&L scandal and the subsequent 1991 recession. Monetarism — the idea that the government should price-fix credit by artificially limiting interest rates — was thoroughly embraced by Republicans, then and now, and Greenspan's adherence to it was the very reason Reagan appointed him. Clinton's work toward balancing the budget and paying down the deficit probably limited the growth rate of the bubble and helped prevent the crash from being a bigger mess than it could've been. (Not that Clinton was consciously embracing Austrian economics or the like. But he had the common sense that it's a bad thing to spend money you don't have, which both the Keynesians and the Monetarists have repeatedly refused to learn. Of course, Republican contrariness helped a lot — I doubt that Clinton would've had that kind of fiscal discipline if both the House and Senate had been Democrat-controlled.)
On border security... the 9/11 hijackers all entered the US under their own names, with genuine Saudi Arabian passports, and had been granted genuine US visas to live here legally. Either they should have been spotted and stopped during the visa approval phase, or the FBI and other agencies should've caught and arrested them after they had incriminated themselves within US borders (as the agencies came painfully close to doing). Customs agents at an airport aren't in a position to single people out and accuse them of having long-term terroristic intentions. Nor are they equipped to deal with the subtle passport fraud employed by the hijackers to hide which countries they'd visited recently. Border guards are even more irrelevant to terrorism — the 9/11 hijackers didn't enter the US through Canada or Mexico, and no amount of added security on the Canadian and Mexican borders would've stopped them since they didn't even pass through those borders.
Regarding the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act... the Act had Republican fingerprints all over it. Gramm, Leach, and Bliley were all Republicans; it was passed along partisan lines (Senate Republicans: 53-0, Senate Democrats: 1-44; House: uncounted voice vote, which the Democrat minority didn't feel a need to contest); and Bill Clinton signed it for... actually, I don't know why Bill Clinton signed it, but the bastard signed the Defense of Marriage Act, too, so it's not like "Bill Clinton signed a piece of legislature" means that the piece of legislature was actually supported by Democrats.
More than all that, Clinton didn't get us into any conflicts until there was an international outcry for intervention, and he generally conducted foreign policy in a way that was, at worst, adequate. He kept an eye on Iraq without engaging in any of GWB's blustery rhetoric and sabre-rattling, much less actually invading it with ground troops, and he put CIA attention on Al-Qaeda and bin Laden even before the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, then stepped up scrutiny afterward.
All in all, I can't understand why Clinton is so reviled by Republicans. The Monica thing was unfortunate, but nothing worse than the (then unknown) adulterous peccadilloes of the very Republican congressmen who were so keen on having Clinton's head. The Republican uproar over Bosnia, and their shouts of "wag the dog", seem quaint
... The more I think about it, the more I feel like I was too cocky in shooting from the hip in this post.
Oh, and jumping back to strong-currency countries, their exports will soon do quite handsomely due to the time lag between US price inflation and US dollar devaluation. US exports will only strengthen much later in the cycle, after the US dollar has taken the devaluation hit. (Again, only true if Bernanke and Paulson can get their inflationary consumption bubble expanding again. It seems likely to me that they can squeeze about one more round out of the Ponzi-go-round before they crash it so hard that they need to revalue the USD.)
So if you want a short-term investment, skip the gold and go for foreign exporters or US importers. The stronger the foreign currency is versus the USD, the faster and hotter the action will be, up until Bernanke hikes interest rates to "cool off" the economy and the USD monetary inflation slows down.
T-bills don't represent economic value. You might claim that they represent the value collected by government taxation, or maybe go off into some delusion that the government gets to double-count the value of GDP, but in reality the government pays for interest on bonds by issuing more bonds, not by raising taxes, which means bonds are ultimately unbacked except by currency devaluation.
No -- buy now, sell later. Gold has just dropped some $300 and might very well drop another $200 in the short term, putting it more in line with historic gold-growth:CPI ratios in the $500-$600 range. But massive amounts of monetary inflation are happening right now due to the "rescue" activities, so a return to a gold uptrend is inevitable on the scale of, say, the next 10 years.
Actually, thinking about it, more base commodities like copper and oil futures are probably a better buy than gold itself. Oil has the benefit that it'll probably pay off sooner, due the likelihood that we're at or past peak oil. There's so much buyer attention on gold and silver right now that the less glamorous stuff like copper will have the better deals. But gold will still be a massive win compared to USD itself or USD T-bills, especially with T-bill yields as low as they are, and gold will be competitive with stocks in US-based companies that don't run on exports. (Unless, of course, you feel like gambling that you can anticipate the pop of the next stock bubble, which itself involves the gamble that Bernanke and Paulson can get another bubble started before spinning the US into Germany-style hyperinflation as they desperately try to prime the Ponzi scheme pump. That's what they get for trying to price-fix credit.)
All that said: stocks in US-based companies that do most of their business in exports, OTOH, will likely give better returns than gold, if you pick the right ones, so 100% gold is clearly stupid. And, if you can find a country that's not busy "coordinating" interest rate cuts and "stimulating" their way out of fiscal responsibility -- a rare thing these days -- then that country's economy ought to be a healthy, non-bubbley investment.
What do you call the housing bubble, the oil bubble, the commodity bubble, the food bubble, ...? They popped, for now, but the government is busy pumping massive amounts of unbacked money into the system (see: $700 billion bailout, 1% federal funds rate, ...) on top of the deficit spending in Iraq, and rest assured that all of this unbacked spending will cause yet another "boom" (i.e. inflationary price bubble). At this point, it's a coin flip on whether the current policies will result in an economy like 1990's Japan or like 1920's Germany, but the inevitable end game of the current Ponzi scheme will be one or the other of those two outcomes. (My penny's on Germany -- the US doesn't have a high enough savings rate to sustain a Japan.)
I just wish I had money to invest in gold right now, before the next bubble starts.
The idea is "marginal utility". Let's imagine two people, Foo and Bar.
First, Foo. Foo is single and works as an overnight Wal-mart stocker living in Wichita, KS. He earns $10/hr in pre-tax wages, which is about $400/week, $1800/month, or $20000/year. Multiply by 0.70 to subtract out 30% income tax, which cuts that income from $1800/month pre-tax to $1260/month take-home. Subtract rent, which runs around $450/month in Wichita, and Foo now has $810/month. Subtract out basic utilities (water, natural gas, electricity), which comes to about $300/month during the summer (Kansas has a stretch in August where the highs break 100F daily -- people die every year from heatstroke due to a lack of air conditioning), leaving Foo with $510/month. Subtract a 7.3% sales tax, and Foo is down to $472.77. Now Foo can spend that $472.77 on groceries to feed himself, gasoline to drive to work (WMTA public transit being worse than useless), car insurance and registration, and any optional utilities, like a telephone or TV. If Foo is smart and rents a place within a mile or two of work, then he might be able to eke out an existence. Foo is in the sort-of grey area between "working poor" and "lower middle class", but much closer to "working poor".
Now, Bar. Bar is single and works as a programmer at Google for a salary in the ballpark of $75000/year while living in San Francisco, CA. Thus, Bar makes $6250/month pre-tax. Multiply by 0.70 to subtract out 30% income tax, which cuts that to $4375/month. Subtract rent, which in San Francisco will run you from $1600/month to $2400/month for a studio or 1-bedroom. We'll call it $2000/month for a 1 bedroom, which brings Bar's post-tax, post-rent income down to $2375/month. Subtract utilities, which are roughly the same price in San Francisco as they are in Wichita (slightly more expensive rates, but no air conditioning), which brings it to $2075/month. Subtract an 8.5% sales tax (which incorrectly assumes Bar is spending all his income), and what's left is $1898.62/month for food, gasoline (if any -- SF Muni is annoying but functional), and any optional utilities (which are about the same price as they are in Wichita). Bar can easily get by -- it doesn't even qualify as eking, even though he pays more than 4 times as much rent as Foo but earns less than 4 times as much income. His overall expenses are smaller in proportion to his income. Bar, in contrast to Foo, is clearly middle class... due to the marginal utility of money.
Now imagine a flat 3% income tax hike. Foo's post-utility, post-sales-tax income -- which still needs to pay for food, gas, and any discretional spending -- has dropped from $472.77 to $422.71, a drop of about $50. Bar's post-utility, post-sales-tax income has dropped from $1898.62/month to $1727.06/month, a drop of about $172. Despite the fact that Bar took a much larger income hit than Foo in absolute terms, and an equal hit in percentage terms, Foo has taken the larger hit in terms of the utility of money.
Suppose Foo had previously been spending $60/week ($270/month) on food, $60/month on gasoline (assuming $3.00/gallon), $67/month amortized on registration/insurance, and $80/month on a cellphone. Now Foo needs to find a place in his budget to subtract $50/month. He could give up the cellphone, thus (a) removing his primary connection to his family, (b) removing his ability to make emergency calls, including to tell work that he won't make it in tonight so please don't fire him as no-call/no-show, and (c) destroying his ability to find a better job, because everyone expects a potential employee to have a contact phone number. Dropping from a cellphone to a landline would only save $30/month or so. He could give up the car, thus (a) forcing him to walk to work, thus wasting 2 hours a day, or $450/month in value, (b) removing his ability to drive himself to the
Well, that's easy enough: the bacterial environment changes somehow, which shifts the carrying capacity, which then follows the laws of Population Dynamics to reach the new carrying capacity.
99% of the time, when you're dealing with a pure bacterial culture in isolation, the reason for the environment change is simple evolution: a new strain of bacterium arises through recombination and/or mutation, and the new strain is Darwinistically fitter than the old dominant strain. ("Darwinistically fitter" is, of course, in the context of the current environment... which includes the behaviors and population sizes of both the old and new strains, meaning it is not an absolute scale.) Since the new strain is superior in context, it replaces the old strain. Compared to the old strain, the new strain might be more efficient at using food, in which case the population is definitely below capacity; or it might be less efficient at using food, in which case the population is quite likely above capacity. (A strain that was less efficient might nonetheless be superior — if it developed, for example, the ability to poison its cousins and eat their tasty, tasty corpses as they died. Mmm, braiiiins.)
Whatever the reasons for the changing environment, evolutionary or not, Population Dynamics now kicks in. If the colony is below capacity, it grows exponentially, shoots past the new capacity, and its growth evens out as it finds itself above capacity. Once the colony is above capacity, the growth rate turns negative, a die-off follows, the colony's population plummets below the carrying capacity, and growth evens out again, thus closing the loop. Due to the equations involved, though, the population's distance from carrying capacity feeds back into the growth rates — in such a way that the oscillations gradually dampen out with each swing. In the limit of Time->+Infinity the population would exactly reach the new carrying capacity. (Unless at some point the population had crashed hard enough to reach 0, in which case the whole colony will be extinct. But since this is a single colony and not a predator-prey dynamic, that could only happen on the first swing downward.)
Human economics doesn't work like bacterial colonies, though, because human economies are not colonies of monoclonal, single-strain businesses with identical strategies. As with bacteria, businesses are constantly being "born" and "dying", but unlike bacteria a business can respond to its environment with more subtle choices than death versus stasis versus self-cloning. The result is that, while businesses are in a constant state of flux around a constantly-shifting carrying capacity in the "economic ecology", there is no naturally-occurring opportunity for those fluctuations to balloon to the boom-bust proportions we see in the modern economic world: their natural behavior is to dampen, and dampen quickly.
Changes in bacterial strategy shift over the course of generations of bacteria, which gives the oscillations enough time to do their work: the bacteria respond to the present environment, without predicting the future environment, and they can't change their patterns of behavior without rewriting their DNA via evolution. In contrast, changes in business strategy are capable of occurring over the course of weeks or months, far shorter than the lifetime of a business. Because businesses don't have their strategies hard-coded into DNA, they can predict what's coming and let go of maladaptive strategies much more quickly, without dying. They can thus respond to the changing "ecology" rapidly enough to slow down the overcorrections past equilibrium, in both directions, and they thus approach equilibrium far more quickly than bacteria d
Not really, no. When Marx was making the observations that led to the Communist Manifesto, he saw the rise of the boom-bust business cycle during the Industrial Revolution as proof that laissez faire capitalism — a new thing at the time — was a fundamentally flawed system that would be replaced with his Glorious Communist Revolution(TM). That is, laissez faire capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, AND the boom-bust cycle appeared at roughly the same time, so Marx (and many others) assumed they were all part of the same thing.
What Marx and others missed was that the newly-risen boom-bust cycle wasn't a property of capitalism itself, but rather a property of fractional reserve banking, which was one of the many new forms of fraud to arise in the newly-born free market that was still learning to police itself. When banks kept fractional reserves, they invented money out of thin air by loaning out money that didn't belong to them. In fact, each bank printed its own bank notes, which were notionally worth a given amount of gold, but frequently worth far less. As the banks loaned out un-backed bank notes — bogus IOUs for gold — they created speculative investment bubbles that looked like a good thing at first, but ultimately caused local price inflation within that bank's sphere of influence. As people tried to buy cheaper items from outside the bank's sphere of influence, in other regions of the country, third party banks tried to cash in on the bogus IOUs that they'd been given, draining the inflationary bank's gold reserves. When word got out that the inflationary bank was low on gold, it imploded in a bank run, while reality reasserted itself by bringing prices back down.
When Marx made his observations, few countries had a central bank at the time, so individual private banks could only drive relatively small and localized bubbles within their respective spheres of influence. Smarter banks only leveraged themselves out at a small enough ratio, like 2:1, so that they could survive a run and would not be depleted too badly by other banks cashing in IOUs — gambling that other banks would run at the same or greater leverage, on average. Dumb banks burned themselves out with stupendous amounts of leverage — but, so long as they burned so very brightly, they looked like a benefit to the community, despite the rising prices, because they gave out loans to so many people.
Later, by the early 20th century, banks started cooperating in a centralized manner, allowing them to coordinate their inflationary activities and prevent reality from asserting itself by combining into a single, limitless sphere of influence that simultaneously enveloped an entire country with lockstep inflation. By joining forces, they could keep the bubble growing bigger and lasting longer, with the ultimate goal of making the bubble grow forever. After a series of false starts during the 1910s, they seemingly succeeded at their goal: the Roaring '20s, which at the time were hailed as a new era of prosperity. The bubble grew so big and lasted so long that, when the Ponzi scheme inevitably came crashing down, the result was the Great Depression.
Why would deflation be dangerous? Inflation is a regressive tax in disguise — because inflation has a time lag, the money-creating loans given out by fractional reserve banks benefit those who directly receive the loans, but when they spend that loaned money it drives up prices for everyone else. The people on fixed incomes, like retirees, suffer the most.
Deflation is only dangerous if you believe in the broken window fallacy — that people should blindly consume, consume, consume to drive up the GDP (and join the Ponzi scheme until the next time it pops) rather than saving their money until they can invest it wisely.
Do you believe that a barter system has a dangerously deflationary bias? Because gold is nothing more than a refinement of the barter system, and when the US dollar collapses in an orgy of hyperinflation, a barter system will be the only workable choice.
Until the FDIC itself goes broke, which it's not terribly far from doing right now — 1.01% reserve ratio as of June 30. This is why the government was so happy to snatch Wachovia out of Citibank's hands and give it to Wells Fargo, rather than risking the Deposit Insurance Fund any further.
If the FDIC goes tits-up, then we reach the end game of the fractional reserve banking system: the government prints money to bail out the FDIC, because that's also "too big to fail", which triggers an inevitable hyperinflationary meltdown that brings about the end of the US dollar. And Shiva dances, or something.
Not really. Gold has value as decoration (and in various industrial processes, and as an electrical conductor, and ...) PLUS it's fungible (two halves of a gold bar is just as valuable as a whole gold bar) PLUS it's stable (gold mining happens at a predictable pace) PLUS it's rare enough that it has concentrated value (a small amount is worth a lot, even for the decorative value alone) PLUS it's impossible to forge or counterfeit, even by a government (i.e. it's inflation-proof).
How much of that can be said about little bits of green paper?
Oh, no no no no no, don't even joke about that, much less mean it. I'm a lefty Democrat living in San Francisco who thinks the Libertarians are a bit wacky for arguing against socialized health care and who thinks that the solution to the current crisis is tighter regulation. But don't give the government even greater opportunity to hold a legal monopoly on counterfeiting money (which is what inflation fundamentally is). Banks loaning money, even to investors and speculators, is not the problem. Banks fraudulently loaning out money that they don't own is the problem, which isn't merely legal but is all but required for banks participating in the Federal Reserve system. (And, if you hadn't guessed, Participation Is Mandatory, Citizen.)
Fractional reserve banking, orchestrated by the Fed's interest rate cuts, is what got us into this mess. When the Fed cuts rates, commercial banks borrow more money from the Fed to replenish their reserves, knowing that they can pay it back later and still pocket a profit. Since they operate at a legally mandated 10:1 reserve ratio, every $1 borrowed from the Fed allows them to "create" $10 worth of new loans to businesses, home buyers... and, yes, speculators. All of the loan recipients — including the speculators, but not limited to them — drive up prices and create a bubble. However, the bubble must ultimately pop because money has increased but value has not.
Greenspan cut the rate in 2001-2004 to "stimulate" our way out of the Dot Com bust, thus creating the housing bubble. The Dot Com bubble itself was also due to Greenspan, who cut the rate in 1991-1994 to "stimulate" us out of the Savings & Loan bust... which was just in time for Yahoo's 1996 IPO. And so on, going back right through the Great Depression and the Roaring '20s, all the way back to the unregulated private banks of the 1800s, who created localized boom-bust cycles if they kept only fractional reserves but put themselves at risk of a bank run (the market's response to fraud) and were frequently driven out of business by the angry mobs. (Among the "good" banks, few truly kept a 1:1 ratio because loaning out money only from within your profits takes a huge amount of discipline. But a "good" bank would voluntarily limit itself to e.g. 2:1 because of its fear of bank runs. And a 2:1 ratio was usually enough reserves to placate the angry mob and prevent an implosion.)
On top of all that, inflation is a regressive tax in disguise: because of the time delay between invented money and rising prices, those who touch the money first will extract the benefit from it, and those who touch the money last will instead suffer from rising prices. Since the ultra-rich touch the money far sooner than Joe Random Wal-mart Associate, and Jane Random Retired Widow never touches it, the net result is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. This makes it clear why Republicans are so slow to badmouth the Fed — the Fed is funneling money to their ultra-rich buddies and single-handedly creating the vast majority of the wealth gap.
If you take away the middle man and give the Fed even more direct power, the last fig leaf on the system will be blown away and the final round of the Ponzi scheme will crash hard enough to hyperinflate the dollar and trash the US economy for decades.
That's not really fair to the Dot Com boom. All booms are vaporware. The Fed cuts interest rates to get out of a bust, which drives up monetary inflation because of fractional-reserve banking. Because money is suddenly more plentiful due to cheap credit, a shiny new boom appears. But the boom drives up prices, turning monetary inflation into price inflation. When that hidden inflation finally hits consumers in the wallet, the Ponzi scheme falls apart and a bust begins. Rinse and repeat.
The boom-bust cycle has nothing to do with the stock market. The stock market and boom-bust cycles are both far older than merely 20 years; Marx was complaining about the boom-bust cycle in the mid-1800s.
According to the Austrian School of economics, the boom-bust cycle is caused by inflation and fractional-reserve banking. (1) The Fed cuts interest rates to stimulate the economy. (2) Banks borrow more cash from the Fed. (3) Banks loan out 10 times as much cash as the amount they just borrowed from the Fed — maintaining a 10:1 fractional reserve. (4) Businesses see easier loans and lower interest rates, so they invest in more equipment in anticipation of future growth. (5) The manufacturers of the equipment in Step 4 profit, so they pass some of that on to their workers. (6) The workers from Step 5, happy with their current savings, spend their new profits. (7) The increased consumer spending increases investor confidence, driving up the stock market. (8) The extra money from Step 6 cycles through the economy a few times, driving up prices and making the hidden inflation from Step 3 become obvious. (9) The Fed hikes rates to "cool off" the economy and "fight" inflation. (10) The higher prices make consumers realize that their current savings aren't worth as much as they used to be, so they cut back on spending and save more. (11) The sales expected in Step 4 fail to materialize — at least, not to the degree expected — but interest rates are now rising, so the equipment bought during the boom turns out to be a money-losing bad investment. (12) Stocks crash as investors pull their money out of the businesses that got pinched by inflation. (1) The Fed cuts interest rates to stimulate the economy....
If the government throws money at the problem, e.g. by passing a $700 billion bailout without raising taxes by an equal amount, the result is more inflation. The extra spending might trigger another boom that temporarily hides the bust, but the hike in inflation risks a crucial third transition in the financial reasoning of consumers: instead of alternating between "wow, I have lots of money" and "wow, my money isn't worth much", the risk is that consumers will perceive that inflation is happening at a fast enough rate that cash is dangerous to own. The result is that consumers spend everything, including their savings, in the hopes of buying durable goods that they'll be able to resell or barter later. This is hyperinflation, which is where Germany went after World War I and where Zimbabwe is today... and it looks increasingly like the US dollar will go there in the not-too-distant future, especially if the FDIC runs out of cash-on-hand like they're in serious danger of doing right now.
Not really. No thing can travel faster than the speed of light, but spacetime is a metric (a numbering system), not a thing. When Hubble's was first proposed, this was thoroughly hashed out: new space continuously appears inbetween any two points A and B. If A and B are sufficiently distant, then enough new space accumulates such that 1 light-year or more of it appears between A and B over the course of 1 year, and thus A and B become causally disconnected... even without inflation. Inflationary Big Bang theory just does the same thing, only faster (i.e. "sufficiently distant" was measured in tiny fractions of a meter, rather than light-years). It's not a contradiction of General Relativity any more than the Alcubierre warp drive (albeit Hubble expansion has the property of actually existing).
True that we don't know what caused inflation, but the fact that it stopped suddenly means that whatever was driving it is "done". String Theorists seem to think it's due to some sort of spring-like tension tied up in the compacted higher dimensions of space that we normally don't notice, and that inflation was when three of them somehow uncoiled and sprung loose into the universe we know today. I've heard speculation that more spatial dimensions might similarly spring loose at some point in the future, and further speculation that that's what's causing Dark Energy (acceleration of the Hubble expansion). But I know even less about String Theory than I do about GR, so I'm probably just embarrassing myself at this point.
In Hubble expansion, space itself isn't moving in the sense of going from A to B. Again, space is a metric, not a thing, so it can't "move" at all. Hubble expansion is completely uniform: pick any two points of space, measure the distance with a beam of light, and you will find that the distance increases over time, and that the rate of increase is larger if A and B are farther away. (Although if there are objects at A and B, and the two points are sufficiently close, gravitational or electromagnetic attraction will pull the objects together faster than the Hubble expansion can pull them apart, causing the objects to leave points A and B behind.)
Things are different in the Alcubierre metric, since the Alcubierre metric is non-homogenous, but that involves exotic matter (imaginary mass, negative mass-squared) so, just like wormholes, Alcubierre metrics don't seem to actually exist.
No, fertilization isn't when a baby is created: it's a possible ancestor cell of one or more babies... or of a hydatiform mole that kills the mother without an abortion, but whatever. We wouldn't be having this moronic discussion if humans didn't use DNA methylation to turn off stem cell activity and thus could reproduce by budding or cuttings like plants can -- exfoliation would literally be murder by your worldview.
And, in fact, if scientists ever discover how to turn a differentiated adult human cell into a totipotent stem cell (i.e. capable of becoming a fetus), then exfoliation will be murder, because every skin cell is a possible ancestor cell of one or more babies as well, just like a fertilized egg.
You're one of those fucking freaks who's going to be convinced some day that some people don't have souls (e.g. sold it to Satan, or got possessed by demons, or descended from So-and-So child of Adam or Noah or whoever), and therefore it's OK to hurt or kill them, because even though they sound like they're in pain, they're not really in pain and it's not really a sin.
I hope I never meet you. Ever.
Let's start with a recap of some statements that are true under current physical theories: (1) space itself is expanding (Hubble Expansion); (2) early in the history of the universe, the expansion of space was faster than the speed of light (Inflationary Big Bang theory); (3) nothing can exceed the speed of light, not even gravity or information (Special and General Relativity); and (4) we are confined our "observable universe": a bubble 92 billion light-years in diameter (General Relativity plus Inflationary Big Bang theory — 13.7 billion light-years, plus inflation, plus 13.7 billion years of Hubble expansion).
Given these facts, neither gravity nor information from outside our observable universe can enter it.
Sure, parts of what we currently consider the observable universe might, in their own relativistic timeline, be "currently" experiencing a gravitational tug from parts of the universe that we can't currently observe, even in principle. However, if that is true, then either (a) such observable places will exit our field of observation before we observe that gravitational tug (i.e. the universe will expand faster than light), or (b) such unobservable places exerting a gravitational tug will enter our field of observation before we see the tug on things we can currently see (i.e. the universe will expand slower than light).
There's no way that information could take a roundabout path to us and arrive faster than information traveling in a straight line (or, more correctly in GR, a geodesic). Think about it: if light/gravity/information cannot travel directly to us, because the direct path is too long and too slow, how could it travel indirectly to us? The indirect path is, by definition, longer and slower than the direct path.
I suppose that, if a large mass was once observable but now is not (i.e. it tugged on some galaxies, then inflation happened), the theory in the article might make a certain amount of sense. But the timescale of inflation (fractions of a second after the Big Bang) doesn't really leave a lot of time for that to happen. It sounds much more plausible to my ears that either (a) there is a previously-undiscovered conglomeration of dark matter in that direction, but it still lies within our observable bubble; or (b) the galaxies in question are at high velocity but no longer accelerating, indicating leftover momentum from an ejection, collision, or some other high-energy event in the early universe.
OTOH, I'm no physicist, so maybe I'm missing something, or maybe the actual theory being promoted makes more sense than Space.com's rather awful writeup.
Oh, and yes, obviously vacuuming out a small blob of cells with no nerves, no brain, and no ability to feel pain is clearly a far more enormous moral violation, a greater shock to the conscience, than disposing of an animal...
Yup, even though that cat had a brain and nerves and the ability to suffer greatly before it died alone and despairing, at least Petcka didn't perform a first-trimester abortion!
Or a miscarriage, or a tubal pregnancy that kills the mother, or a hydatiform mole that spreads throughout her body like cancer, or choriocarcinoma which actually is a cancer, or an anencephalic fetus that dies in the womb and starts rotting the mother from the inside out...
Yup, gotta loves them thar' unmolested cells...
Nah, I tried that years ago, and I'm still gay.
Bah-dum-bum.
See, now, when I look at the stages of pregnancy, I see fertilization as "large cell plus tiny wannabe-cell equals large cell", not some sort of dramatic change worthy of special treatment... much less a supernatural event where a hidden deity sneaks a soul in, as claimed by the religious folks. This view is validated by the fact that a single fertilization can readily lead to two (or hypothetically more) resulting embryos, resulting in multiple unique individuals with identical DNA. This tells me that DNA is not really central to what it means to be an individual, unique person. Therefore, the moment when two haploid genomes join into a diploid genome isn't a particularly good moment to start saying that a cell has become a person.
Instead, I ask myself the question: what makes a person a person? And my answer is that a person (1) reacts to the surrounding environment; (2) remembers the past, learns from it, and makes predictions from it; and (3) has a personality, which seems to be a second-order effect of established memory plus genetic biases. (Yes, by this standard, many animals count as "persons". I'm not terribly concerned about that: in this context of "person", I'm concerned with how to treat a person ethically, and it's clear that animals with these traits must also be treated ethically.) And it's obvious to me that, while some of these things start while the fetus is in the womb — certainly the first, and the beginnings of the second — they definitely don't start until after the embryo has become a fetus, and based on how the brain works they definitely don't start prior to the formation of the human-style frontal cortex around weeks 22-26.
As a result, I don't see any moral issues whatsoever in abortion in the first trimester or the early second trimester, for the same reason I don't see moral issues in masturbation or exfoliation or hysterectomies. The bigger moral concern is the emotional well-being of the mother. Pregnancy is a big deal, after all: the choices surrounding pregnancy — abortion included — take on a very weighty importance due to their massively life-changing consequences.
Kind of a bad example. Penrose is a mathematician who focuses on big-picture physics (relativity and cosmology). Beyond his speculation on "quantum consciousness", he is not recognized as an expert in either neuroscience or quantum mechanics. I put as much stock in Penrose talking about consciousness as I would in a neurosurgeon talking about his pet sub-theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
In the US, there are basically three effects from declaring a party affiliation: (1) you are permitted to vote in that party's primaries, (2) you receive targeted political junk mail, and (3) you show up in state-released statistics on how many registered voters there are for each party. Primary election rules vary by both party and state: in some states you don't even need to register with a party to vote in its primary, so in those states declaring a party is almost pointless.
Oh, just to be clear, each running copy of Firefox needs a separate profile. If you fail to give the subsequent copies of Firefox unique profiles, you get a confusing but protective "Firefox is not responding" message. If that check weren't there, they would corrupt the profile (history, cookies, bookmarks, prefs.js, yadda) as they both tried writing to it.
You can start Firefox with "-ProfileManager" to open the Profile Manager window, and you can use "-P <profile-name>" (in combination with "--no-remote") to use specified profiles. Great for keeping a profile just for online banking, for instance.