Now the gold price is a measure of inflation? A metal with no inherent value whose price can be easily influenced by a few people buying it? Anyway, 1600 from 19 in 100 years that's an inflation of exp(log(1600/19.) / 100) - 100% = 4.5% -- doesn't sound like hyperinflation to me, especially compared to the growth in disposable income per capita http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=7Wt which grew from 10000$ to 30000$ over the past 30 years which gives me 3.7% annual growth (which for the record is above CPI growth). People are being robbed sloooooooowly it seems.
BTW I find it funny to see how the scores of both your post and my first post jump up and down all the time. It appears there are a number of libertarians modding out of political motivation being barely held in check by more intelligent moderators. Just kidding with the interpretation, but the observation is funny nonetheless.
Anyway, if Krugman is independent of the market's movements by not investing based on his predictions, it appears to me that he is in a much better position to give neutral advice than somebody who depends on their bets turning out successful.
Besides, I forgot to say this. There's a lot of value added after the raw materials are imported. You should really use consumer prices when you try to measure inflation. It simply doesn't matter how much wheat costs, if it's only a small fraction of what one pays for a cake. That aside from the prices of agricultural products being highly volatile, choose +- 1 year and you can get a factor two in price in both directions.
Well, I'm too lazy to do the math for all the cases you give, but where I did it the average annual change needed for the change over the period given falls into the ballpark of CPI. It would have been a lot more useful if you had taken you table an given the exponential of (the logarithm of (the ratio of prices) divided by number of years elapsed). And come on, rubber?
Anyway, how do these numbers show me the hyperinflation of Ron Paul escapes me.
I'm averaging very roughly, forgive me. From the graph I read that their inflation rate since 1990 was on average 7% (per annum), whereas the CPI gave 3%. That's a price increase of 1.07^22 = 4.43 vs. 1.03^22 = 1.91 over the 22 years since. I picked a random price of the internet to see what comes closer. Of course the product is boxed so there is some fudge factor and I could have made a lucky choice of product -- I just picked the first product that came to mind where I could find prices both past and current. I find on this page that 36oz of Corn Flakes cost 3.98$ in 1990 while in 2012 they cost 11.40$, which is a factor of 2.86, which is significantly closer to 1.91 on a linear scale, and slightly closer to 1.91 on the more appropriate log scale. Color me unconvinced.
So where is this inflation that you are seeing right now? Consumer Price Index certainly doesn't show it. According to the St Louis fed the monetary base nearly tripled in late 2008 while inflation remained unchanged (I plotted change in CPI times 100 in order to fit both plots on the same graph. So where's the 1970ies-like inflation to go along with it?
Maybe your view of the world is a tiny bit too simplistic.
Ok, so there were people who predicted a crisis. This doesn't take away from the fact that during the crisis Krugman was right on most counts, whereas the hyper-inflation Paul has been obsessing over hasn't come to take place.
As for the war with aliens quotes that's not what he said, not even in your link.
Care to explain how Krugman's predictions on how the crisis would pan out have been so accurate if he doesn't understand any economics? Care also to explain where the inflation, long predicted by the likes of senator Paul and other epigones of Hayek, has been hiding?
As for the nobel peace prize awarded to Obama: that was political indeed, but how could the peace prize not be?
Sorry, everybody with some decency had asked themselves that question before. Of course decency is a quality rarely found in the target audience of a GOP debate.
The iPad wasn't a revolution, it was an evolution of the iPhone. Without the iPhone and its apps the iPad wouldn't have been the success it has been. Apple's genius was recognizing that they could extend the striving ecosphere of the iPhone to another device, and thereby kickstart its adoption. That's the major advantage they've had over other people trying to launch tablets, and it's an advantage that they created, so I'm not belittling it. The device in itself wasn't revolutionary.
But $100,000 for someone earning $20M/yr is a much more trivial expense than $100 for someone making $20K/yr. For the former it cuts into affording stuff like this year's Lamborgini, for the latter it will cut directly into one of food, shelter, clothes, transportation. Not to say that this system isn't fairer than a flat $100 for everybody, just pointing out that once you earn several 100 times what is needed for a comfortable living, a few $100,000 more don't have add much value (except for the bragging rights).
And I'm only risking my own damfool neck, I can at most cause others a dent. Or something.
But that's exactly the point! Traffic lights are there for cars because they can cause lots of damage. That, and it is much more comfortable to wait for a traffic light to turn green sitting in a car, listening to some music of your choosing at a temperature of your prefernce than it is half standing on a bike exposed to weather and traffic noise. All this skews cyclists towards running traffic lights before any sense of entitlement comes into play.
I've been using WindowMaker as my window manager since sometime during the nineties. I use it to keep open lots of xterms, a few emacs windows, Thunderbird, Firefox clearly assigned to virtual desktops. That's all I need for work. I tried using fluxbox, but after I had to do post-mortem debugger resuscitations one too many times, I found out that I don't need fluxbox's tabbed windows, and that stability easily is the most important issues for my "focussed window determination software". Every once in a while I fire up whatever KDE's application panel tends to be called that day and see what new apps the admins have installed, but if I need them, I launch them from an xterm. Much easier than looking around the ever-changing start-menu varieties invented by GUI designers.
So yes, except for moving focus between windows IMO everything is easier done from the command line.
The German guy who got fired (had to resign, actually) was not an official, he was working for his party. He also (probably, IANAL, developing story and all that) didn't do anything illegal, he just misused the trust bestowed upon him. Which probably is worse, even though I don't see how his party (FDP) was in any way hurt by him telling the progress of their coalition dealings with the CDU to the US. Just a jerk trying to be important. And probably the wrong person for the job.
I was fairly disappointed by the first day of this wikileaks release. So American diplomats report back to their foreign ministry about the politicians in their host country, and write the same thing the local newspapers are writing? Wow. What a revelation! Made me lose interest very quickly.
So his argument is that consumption taxes encourage saving money. But that makes it even more unfair to the poor who don't have money to save. Rephrasing his argument: people who can afford to save money can gain more with a consumption tax than with an income tax. In other word, it's a gift to rich people. Which was exactly my first point.
As for the second point and your reply (your sister). I would wonder if it's not actually a gain in quality of life for her that working overtime is discouraged. Her boss certainly won't expect her to do it if there's nothing in it for her. Maybe he'll hire another person -- it will certainly be cheaper for him to hire another person than to pay your sister adequately for the extra time if your numbers are correct. I.e. everybody benefits, it seems. And if she actually enjoys working so much and my point concerning quality of life doesn't hold, then she will certainly also enjoy working overtime without compensation;)
Lastly, yes, if people benefit extraordinarily, I don't see why they should not also contribute extraordinarily (your point about the taxation quantiles).
Also, income taxes are a very inefficient form of taxation because it discourages people from working (Economist Gregory Mankiw wrote an article in the NY Times recently about this). Consumption taxes (sales tax) are much more efficient and fair system of taxation.
Consumption taxes mostly affect the poor. Why? Because they spend a larger fraction of their income on goods. So in that sense it's a much more unfair tax. On the other hand, concerning the argument that an income tax discourages from working: with an income tax you have more money if you work more. How's that discouraging? Could you expand on Mankiw's argument?
I've never understood the Palin hatedom. She seems fairly representative of the mainstream of the American right - do people really hate their neighbors so much?
Two points:
most people don't like to be reminded how stupid their peers really are
most people have neighbors that understand that they are not suited for the office of POTUS
If it's common practice only on one side, how would a "balanced and unbiased" summary look like?
For me as an outside observer it looks like you have one party that attracts all kinds of loons (aka the GOP, you know, even thinking of Palin as somebody who might be let near the white house strikes the rest of the world as silly) and another right-wing party (aka the democrats) that is despised by these loons. Just go to conservapedia.com. I used to go there for a laugh, but the stupidity seems too real nowadays.
Anybody who did their first programming steps with QuickBasic will remember that it came with a demo that did just this. Anyway, the videos are still fun to watch.
LHC is a proton-proton collider, Tevatron (where D0 is situated) an antiproton-proton collider. Therefore Tevatron provides a situation which is symmetric between matter and antimatter, LHC doesn't. The conclusion of the paper is that there is a 1% excess of matter in a situation that started with no preference for matter or antimatter. I don't see how LHC could contribute to this given that they are always starting with two matter particles.
If your project is only used internally, i.e. if it's not distributed, the GPLedness of the libraries you're using plays no role. If you're not distributing, the GPL places no restrictions whatsoever on what you do with the libraries. Now, since you started the project before getting paid to do so, it might be the case that the step where you so to say 'gave' it to the university counts as distribution, and then there would be no alternative to an at-least-GPL-Free license for your project, but that is something you should ask a lawyer about, not slashdot.
The press release you called 'pompous' is one week old -- when the record energy hadn't yet been reached. Apparently going to CERN's front page is too much effort for slashdot's editors. Anyway, here's the current press release
Slashdot Mirror
Now the gold price is a measure of inflation? A metal with no inherent value whose price can be easily influenced by a few people buying it? Anyway, 1600 from 19 in 100 years that's an inflation of exp(log(1600/19.) / 100) - 100% = 4.5% -- doesn't sound like hyperinflation to me, especially compared to the growth in disposable income per capita http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=7Wt which grew from 10000$ to 30000$ over the past 30 years which gives me 3.7% annual growth (which for the record is above CPI growth). People are being robbed sloooooooowly it seems.
BTW I find it funny to see how the scores of both your post and my first post jump up and down all the time. It appears there are a number of libertarians modding out of political motivation being barely held in check by more intelligent moderators. Just kidding with the interpretation, but the observation is funny nonetheless.
well, Peter Schiff's clients appear to have lost money during the crisis, e.g. , and the hyperinflation he has predicted didn't come to place. According to your logic, everybody who invested into housing during the bubble was the wisest man on earth -- and suddenly stopped being so when the bubble collapsed. But maybe I fail to see your logic.
Anyway, if Krugman is independent of the market's movements by not investing based on his predictions, it appears to me that he is in a much better position to give neutral advice than somebody who depends on their bets turning out successful.
Besides, I forgot to say this. There's a lot of value added after the raw materials are imported. You should really use consumer prices when you try to measure inflation. It simply doesn't matter how much wheat costs, if it's only a small fraction of what one pays for a cake. That aside from the prices of agricultural products being highly volatile, choose +- 1 year and you can get a factor two in price in both directions.
Well, I'm too lazy to do the math for all the cases you give, but where I did it the average annual change needed for the change over the period given falls into the ballpark of CPI. It would have been a lot more useful if you had taken you table an given the exponential of (the logarithm of (the ratio of prices) divided by number of years elapsed). And come on, rubber?
Anyway, how do these numbers show me the hyperinflation of Ron Paul escapes me.
I'm averaging very roughly, forgive me. From the graph I read that their inflation rate since 1990 was on average 7% (per annum), whereas the CPI gave 3%. That's a price increase of 1.07^22 = 4.43 vs. 1.03^22 = 1.91 over the 22 years since. I picked a random price of the internet to see what comes closer. Of course the product is boxed so there is some fudge factor and I could have made a lucky choice of product -- I just picked the first product that came to mind where I could find prices both past and current. I find on this page that 36oz of Corn Flakes cost 3.98$ in 1990 while in 2012 they cost 11.40$, which is a factor of 2.86, which is significantly closer to 1.91 on a linear scale, and slightly closer to 1.91 on the more appropriate log scale. Color me unconvinced.
So where is this inflation that you are seeing right now? Consumer Price Index certainly doesn't show it. According to the St Louis fed the monetary base nearly tripled in late 2008 while inflation remained unchanged (I plotted change in CPI times 100 in order to fit both plots on the same graph. So where's the 1970ies-like inflation to go along with it?
Maybe your view of the world is a tiny bit too simplistic.
Ok, so there were people who predicted a crisis. This doesn't take away from the fact that during the crisis Krugman was right on most counts, whereas the hyper-inflation Paul has been obsessing over hasn't come to take place.
As for the war with aliens quotes that's not what he said, not even in your link.
Care to explain how Krugman's predictions on how the crisis would pan out have been so accurate if he doesn't understand any economics? Care also to explain where the inflation, long predicted by the likes of senator Paul and other epigones of Hayek, has been hiding?
As for the nobel peace prize awarded to Obama: that was political indeed, but how could the peace prize not be?
Sorry, everybody with some decency had asked themselves that question before. Of course decency is a quality rarely found in the target audience of a GOP debate.
That depends on how their insurance think about the importance of passenger screening.
The iPad wasn't a revolution, it was an evolution of the iPhone. Without the iPhone and its apps the iPad wouldn't have been the success it has been. Apple's genius was recognizing that they could extend the striving ecosphere of the iPhone to another device, and thereby kickstart its adoption. That's the major advantage they've had over other people trying to launch tablets, and it's an advantage that they created, so I'm not belittling it. The device in itself wasn't revolutionary.
But $100,000 for someone earning $20M/yr is a much more trivial expense than $100 for someone making $20K/yr. For the former it cuts into affording stuff like this year's Lamborgini, for the latter it will cut directly into one of food, shelter, clothes, transportation. Not to say that this system isn't fairer than a flat $100 for everybody, just pointing out that once you earn several 100 times what is needed for a comfortable living, a few $100,000 more don't have add much value (except for the bragging rights).
And I'm only risking my own damfool neck, I can at most cause others a dent. Or something.
But that's exactly the point! Traffic lights are there for cars because they can cause lots of damage. That, and it is much more comfortable to wait for a traffic light to turn green sitting in a car, listening to some music of your choosing at a temperature of your prefernce than it is half standing on a bike exposed to weather and traffic noise. All this skews cyclists towards running traffic lights before any sense of entitlement comes into play.
I've been using WindowMaker as my window manager since sometime during the nineties. I use it to keep open lots of xterms, a few emacs windows, Thunderbird, Firefox clearly assigned to virtual desktops. That's all I need for work. I tried using fluxbox, but after I had to do post-mortem debugger resuscitations one too many times, I found out that I don't need fluxbox's tabbed windows, and that stability easily is the most important issues for my "focussed window determination software". Every once in a while I fire up whatever KDE's application panel tends to be called that day and see what new apps the admins have installed, but if I need them, I launch them from an xterm. Much easier than looking around the ever-changing start-menu varieties invented by GUI designers.
So yes, except for moving focus between windows IMO everything is easier done from the command line.
Steve Urkel?
The German guy who got fired (had to resign, actually) was not an official, he was working for his party. He also (probably, IANAL, developing story and all that) didn't do anything illegal, he just misused the trust bestowed upon him. Which probably is worse, even though I don't see how his party (FDP) was in any way hurt by him telling the progress of their coalition dealings with the CDU to the US. Just a jerk trying to be important. And probably the wrong person for the job.
I was fairly disappointed by the first day of this wikileaks release. So American diplomats report back to their foreign ministry about the politicians in their host country, and write the same thing the local newspapers are writing? Wow. What a revelation! Made me lose interest very quickly.
So his argument is that consumption taxes encourage saving money. But that makes it even more unfair to the poor who don't have money to save. Rephrasing his argument: people who can afford to save money can gain more with a consumption tax than with an income tax. In other word, it's a gift to rich people. Which was exactly my first point.
As for the second point and your reply (your sister). I would wonder if it's not actually a gain in quality of life for her that working overtime is discouraged. Her boss certainly won't expect her to do it if there's nothing in it for her. Maybe he'll hire another person -- it will certainly be cheaper for him to hire another person than to pay your sister adequately for the extra time if your numbers are correct. I.e. everybody benefits, it seems. And if she actually enjoys working so much and my point concerning quality of life doesn't hold, then she will certainly also enjoy working overtime without compensation ;)
Lastly, yes, if people benefit extraordinarily, I don't see why they should not also contribute extraordinarily (your point about the taxation quantiles).
Also, income taxes are a very inefficient form of taxation because it discourages people from working (Economist Gregory Mankiw wrote an article in the NY Times recently about this). Consumption taxes (sales tax) are much more efficient and fair system of taxation.
Consumption taxes mostly affect the poor. Why? Because they spend a larger fraction of their income on goods. So in that sense it's a much more unfair tax. On the other hand, concerning the argument that an income tax discourages from working: with an income tax you have more money if you work more. How's that discouraging? Could you expand on Mankiw's argument?
I've never understood the Palin hatedom. She seems fairly representative of the mainstream of the American right - do people really hate their neighbors so much?
Two points:
If it's common practice only on one side, how would a "balanced and unbiased" summary look like?
For me as an outside observer it looks like you have one party that attracts all kinds of loons (aka the GOP, you know, even thinking of Palin as somebody who might be let near the white house strikes the rest of the world as silly) and another right-wing party (aka the democrats) that is despised by these loons. Just go to conservapedia.com. I used to go there for a laugh, but the stupidity seems too real nowadays.
Anybody who did their first programming steps with QuickBasic will remember that it came with a demo that did just this. Anyway, the videos are still fun to watch.
LHC is a proton-proton collider, Tevatron (where D0 is situated) an antiproton-proton collider. Therefore Tevatron provides a situation which is symmetric between matter and antimatter, LHC doesn't. The conclusion of the paper is that there is a 1% excess of matter in a situation that started with no preference for matter or antimatter. I don't see how LHC could contribute to this given that they are always starting with two matter particles.
If your project is only used internally, i.e. if it's not distributed, the GPLedness of the libraries you're using plays no role. If you're not distributing, the GPL places no restrictions whatsoever on what you do with the libraries. Now, since you started the project before getting paid to do so, it might be the case that the step where you so to say 'gave' it to the university counts as distribution, and then there would be no alternative to an at-least-GPL-Free license for your project, but that is something you should ask a lawyer about, not slashdot.
The press release you called 'pompous' is one week old -- when the record energy hadn't yet been reached. Apparently going to CERN's front page is too much effort for slashdot's editors. Anyway, here's the current press release