35% is still a minority. What about the other 65% ?
This graph of ERCOT wind production versus demand illustrates the major problem with renewables. Although it is summer, when wind production is low, this is a real power grid with a huge number of large wind turbines. Notice that peak demand coincides almost exactly with minimum production. Notice also that "minimum production" basically means "zero production".
And while it's true that solar could fill the gap nicely, we will have to (optimistically) live through at least one more "lost decade" for the economy before solar becomes an economically beneficial alternative.
Don't forget the "Helping Governments Spy on their Citizens" area. That's probably the reason for the virtualization, though. Hell, it was probably the reason they killed off that HD camcorder thing. Can't have people uploading high-def videos of the communist reptilian space aliens who run things, now can we? They probably thought they would be able to co-opt it in real time like all those UFO videos you see where the first one looks real and then the poorly-done fakes start pouring in and discredit the whole thing and before you know it it's all kooks and nutjobs who think that 9/11 was done with disintegration rays. Those 12,000 people were probably working on building $500 hammers for the CIA, amirite?
The cause of deflation isn't the lack of money printing. The cause is physical reality. Using a monetary system that, instead, attempts to deny physical reality will end in a much larger failure down the road. All money printing can do is delay this inevitability.
Look, deflation isn't a bad thing. Deflation is just the price of things going down, as technology improves and resources become more abundant. Why would you complain about that? That's the entire reason that people invest their time and energy into creating new technologies in the first place: to make life better. Hell, it's the only reason people do any work at all.
What monetary inflation does instead, is it robs those people of the fruits of their labor, and uses it to subsidize government mouth-pieces or pointless fraudulent warfare, or misallocation of resources by central planners or the staging of fake alien invasions. Can you see why Paul Krugman would be in favor of that?
You're making the mistake of assuming that hoarding Bitcoins prevents trade. It doesn't. Bitcoins can be infinitely divided. You can trade with 0.0000001 Bitcoin just as easily as you can with 5. The important thing is that price changes should follow as closely as possible the change in productive capacity of the entire economy. And the way to accomplish this is to let the market decide how much a Bitcoin is really worth, free of central planning.
That's exactly the point. Speculators don't care, because they can buy and hold until the (monetary) inflation ends and deflation kicks in. People who just wish to use the currency for trade, however, can't hoard and don't want to use a currency that fluctuates in value over the short term.
Contrary to this information warfare you hear from propagandists like Krugman, speculators and hoarders actually help to stabilize a currency, which makes it more attractive to use for trade. In order to support vastly more trade, Bitcoin needs more hoarders, not fewer.
If you conservatively value the Bitcoin network as equivalent to a company like Paypal, the long term price trend is much, much higher than where it is now. Unfortunately not enough people are willing to make this bet and so there aren't enough buyers to keep the price stable in the face of 30%+ inflation.
You're right that the gold standard doesn't solve the problem of banking, since gold is not easily stored and used. But Bitcoin has solved the problem of lending by banks. Most of those dumb enough to put their Bitcoins in a bank have lost at least half to theft in the last few months.
To answer your question, at least half of the total transactions will be people moving money between different addresses they own, because that is the way the system handles "change". A portion of the remainder will be people collecting newly-minted coins from mining pools, which until recently was a good proportion of the whole.
Consider for a second just what *does* constitute value in the modern economy: environmental degradation, fraudulent financial instruments, political cronyism, ponzi schemes, front-running future generations, designed obsolescence, indiscriminate militarism, forced wealth re-distribution. What makes you think GPUs are worse?
Sorry but in this case the link is immediate. You just don't recognize it. And the results are certainly not trivial. The result of money printing since 2008, even without it being in circulation, is that we avoided the rational outcome of a couple of big banks going under due to their risky mortgage lending, the dimwits who invested in flipping houses on margin and buying houses they couldn't afford having to lose said houses, the price of housing falling, and everyone else's standard of living rising as a result. What we got instead was everyone else's standard of living falling as savers are forced to bail out bankrupt banks and dimwit house-flippers.
Money sitting in a bank's vault directly determines the amount of real assets in the real world that that bank is able to control. This entire "money printing doesn't affect anything if it sits in banks" talking-point is a total bullshit lie.
the government doesn't lie about the inflation rate. It is caculated by a multitude of different organizations, both private and public.
Uh-huh. And if you calculate it the same way it was calculated thirty years ago, before the government changed the formula for some mysterious reason, you'll see that the real rate is actually much higher than the official number.
Well obviously there is price deflation. That's sort of a requirement for any new currency. But you're welcome to print up twenty million of your own dollars with your face on them and see how much demand you get. Something tells me it wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Frankly, I don't have the time right now to correct every wrong assertion that Krugman makes about Bitcoin right now. At first glance, though, it's as though he did absolutely no research whatsoever. He read the main page and saw "limited quantity of Bitcoins" and then went off on another ridiculous aspie rant spouting his usual nonsense.
Here is a list of Bitcoin merchants in wiki form. You can look back through the history and see that real "gross Bitcoin product" has risen significantly, not fallen as he claims. Total "market cap" has risen as well. The value of a Bitcoin in terms of Dollars has only fallen due to the aforementioned 30% inflation rate.
Unfortunately for you and Paul, Bitcoin is undergoing monetary inflation, not deflation. This little fact was conveniently left out of his blog post. New Bitcoins are created every day, at about a 30% annual rate, which actually meets the International Accounting Standards Board definition of hyperinflation. So, for the moment, if you'd like to compare Bitcoin to anything, compare it to Zimbabwe or to the Weimar Republic or to what we will soon see here in the US thanks to Keynesian money-printers like Krugman.
In the video, the user selects from the drop-down first, and then the IP address is automatically filled. It would be useful to get a direct translation of the text.
I'm not exactly sure what Google is trying to achieve.
That's easy. They're trying to monetize your participation in their "community". Now that Wall St. has built a $600 trillion derivatives market of fraudulent debt with which to financially engineer the lives of everyone on the planet, they need to account for the limited resource of "mindshare".
And mindshare is actually fairly valuable. Every minute that you spend playing some pointless game on a social networking site is a minute that you aren't spending consuming resources, or inventing the latest disruptive technology, or reverse-engineering some corporation's obsolete profit-center, or procreating, or engaging in some other activity that is destructive to the interests of the handful of people who own 90% of the planet's capital.
Because the one thing the banksters know, despite what their politician stooges tell you, is that it's a zero sum game.
From a broader perspective, the reasons are the same. On one hand, there's a libertarian/MAD motivation of preventing humanity from spreading beyond Earth to threaten other planets. On the other, there's simply eliminating the reason for humanity to have to spread beyond Earth in the first place, namely ecological destruction and resource depletion. Don't you see the obvious connection between Earth "standing still" and the oil running out? The film is only superficially about violence; there is a deeper ecological theme.
Slashdot Mirror
35% is still a minority. What about the other 65% ?
This graph of ERCOT wind production versus demand illustrates the major problem with renewables. Although it is summer, when wind production is low, this is a real power grid with a huge number of large wind turbines. Notice that peak demand coincides almost exactly with minimum production. Notice also that "minimum production" basically means "zero production".
And while it's true that solar could fill the gap nicely, we will have to (optimistically) live through at least one more "lost decade" for the economy before solar becomes an economically beneficial alternative.
Don't forget the "Helping Governments Spy on their Citizens" area. That's probably the reason for the virtualization, though. Hell, it was probably the reason they killed off that HD camcorder thing. Can't have people uploading high-def videos of the communist reptilian space aliens who run things, now can we? They probably thought they would be able to co-opt it in real time like all those UFO videos you see where the first one looks real and then the poorly-done fakes start pouring in and discredit the whole thing and before you know it it's all kooks and nutjobs who think that 9/11 was done with disintegration rays. Those 12,000 people were probably working on building $500 hammers for the CIA, amirite?
The cause of deflation isn't the lack of money printing. The cause is physical reality. Using a monetary system that, instead, attempts to deny physical reality will end in a much larger failure down the road. All money printing can do is delay this inevitability.
Look, deflation isn't a bad thing. Deflation is just the price of things going down, as technology improves and resources become more abundant. Why would you complain about that? That's the entire reason that people invest their time and energy into creating new technologies in the first place: to make life better. Hell, it's the only reason people do any work at all.
What monetary inflation does instead, is it robs those people of the fruits of their labor, and uses it to subsidize government mouth-pieces or pointless fraudulent warfare, or misallocation of resources by central planners or the staging of fake alien invasions. Can you see why Paul Krugman would be in favor of that?
You're making the mistake of assuming that hoarding Bitcoins prevents trade. It doesn't. Bitcoins can be infinitely divided. You can trade with 0.0000001 Bitcoin just as easily as you can with 5. The important thing is that price changes should follow as closely as possible the change in productive capacity of the entire economy. And the way to accomplish this is to let the market decide how much a Bitcoin is really worth, free of central planning.
Thesis
Antithesis
Synthesis
"Mixed" economy is none of the above and, ironically, exactly the failure mode of Capitalism that Marx identified.
That's exactly the point. Speculators don't care, because they can buy and hold until the (monetary) inflation ends and deflation kicks in. People who just wish to use the currency for trade, however, can't hoard and don't want to use a currency that fluctuates in value over the short term.
Contrary to this information warfare you hear from propagandists like Krugman, speculators and hoarders actually help to stabilize a currency, which makes it more attractive to use for trade. In order to support vastly more trade, Bitcoin needs more hoarders, not fewer.
If you conservatively value the Bitcoin network as equivalent to a company like Paypal, the long term price trend is much, much higher than where it is now. Unfortunately not enough people are willing to make this bet and so there aren't enough buyers to keep the price stable in the face of 30%+ inflation.
You're right that the gold standard doesn't solve the problem of banking, since gold is not easily stored and used. But Bitcoin has solved the problem of lending by banks. Most of those dumb enough to put their Bitcoins in a bank have lost at least half to theft in the last few months.
To answer your question, at least half of the total transactions will be people moving money between different addresses they own, because that is the way the system handles "change". A portion of the remainder will be people collecting newly-minted coins from mining pools, which until recently was a good proportion of the whole.
It is limited. But the supply is not fixed. New Bitcoins enter circulation every day.
Consider for a second just what *does* constitute value in the modern economy: environmental degradation, fraudulent financial instruments, political cronyism, ponzi schemes, front-running future generations, designed obsolescence, indiscriminate militarism, forced wealth re-distribution. What makes you think GPUs are worse?
Sorry but in this case the link is immediate. You just don't recognize it. And the results are certainly not trivial. The result of money printing since 2008, even without it being in circulation, is that we avoided the rational outcome of a couple of big banks going under due to their risky mortgage lending, the dimwits who invested in flipping houses on margin and buying houses they couldn't afford having to lose said houses, the price of housing falling, and everyone else's standard of living rising as a result. What we got instead was everyone else's standard of living falling as savers are forced to bail out bankrupt banks and dimwit house-flippers.
Money sitting in a bank's vault directly determines the amount of real assets in the real world that that bank is able to control. This entire "money printing doesn't affect anything if it sits in banks" talking-point is a total bullshit lie.
the government doesn't lie about the inflation rate. It is caculated by a multitude of different organizations, both private and public.
Uh-huh. And if you calculate it the same way it was calculated thirty years ago, before the government changed the formula for some mysterious reason, you'll see that the real rate is actually much higher than the official number.
Well obviously there is price deflation. That's sort of a requirement for any new currency. But you're welcome to print up twenty million of your own dollars with your face on them and see how much demand you get. Something tells me it wouldn't be nearly as successful.
Frankly, I don't have the time right now to correct every wrong assertion that Krugman makes about Bitcoin right now. At first glance, though, it's as though he did absolutely no research whatsoever. He read the main page and saw "limited quantity of Bitcoins" and then went off on another ridiculous aspie rant spouting his usual nonsense.
Here is a list of Bitcoin merchants in wiki form. You can look back through the history and see that real "gross Bitcoin product" has risen significantly, not fallen as he claims. Total "market cap" has risen as well. The value of a Bitcoin in terms of Dollars has only fallen due to the aforementioned 30% inflation rate.
"Inflation" describes a currency's value, not how much is in circulation.
I see you keep saying that, so I guess that means you think there is no connection between the two?
Let me give you a little hint: gold is an oil standard.
Keep in mind the government lies about the true inflation rate, and the Federal Reserve increased their balance sheet by 100% in 2008 alone.
Unfortunately for you and Paul, Bitcoin is undergoing monetary inflation, not deflation. This little fact was conveniently left out of his blog post. New Bitcoins are created every day, at about a 30% annual rate, which actually meets the International Accounting Standards Board definition of hyperinflation. So, for the moment, if you'd like to compare Bitcoin to anything, compare it to Zimbabwe or to the Weimar Republic or to what we will soon see here in the US thanks to Keynesian money-printers like Krugman.
One slight correction: Reagan didn't sell America "unfettered capitalism". He sold America a really dumb form of wealth redistribution.
Religion is helping them to evolve future generations to be more disaster-tolerant.
In the video, the user selects from the drop-down first, and then the IP address is automatically filled. It would be useful to get a direct translation of the text.
I'm not exactly sure what Google is trying to achieve.
That's easy. They're trying to monetize your participation in their "community". Now that Wall St. has built a $600 trillion derivatives market of fraudulent debt with which to financially engineer the lives of everyone on the planet, they need to account for the limited resource of "mindshare".
And mindshare is actually fairly valuable. Every minute that you spend playing some pointless game on a social networking site is a minute that you aren't spending consuming resources, or inventing the latest disruptive technology, or reverse-engineering some corporation's obsolete profit-center, or procreating, or engaging in some other activity that is destructive to the interests of the handful of people who own 90% of the planet's capital.
Because the one thing the banksters know, despite what their politician stooges tell you, is that it's a zero sum game.
Realistically, the trade deficit says just as much about the type of society that the Chinese are interested in creating.
Anyone smart enough to qualify should be smart enough to hold out for a better offer. :|
Put Linux on it duh.
From a broader perspective, the reasons are the same. On one hand, there's a libertarian/MAD motivation of preventing humanity from spreading beyond Earth to threaten other planets. On the other, there's simply eliminating the reason for humanity to have to spread beyond Earth in the first place, namely ecological destruction and resource depletion. Don't you see the obvious connection between Earth "standing still" and the oil running out? The film is only superficially about violence; there is a deeper ecological theme.
What exactly are they defending against?
Budget cuts.