There has to be a reason why the GOP pushed the exchanges before Obama was in office.
I have no problem with opening up the market for health insurance and separating it (voluntarily, of course) from employment. That situation would never have existed in the first place if it weren't for the price controls on labor during the New Deal era, which left employers looking for ways to bundle extra benefits in lieu of increasing wages. My objections to the ACA lie with the "individual mandate" and the extra requirements placed on insurers, like the requirement to ignore pre-existing conditions.
... everybody pays a little bit and everybody has the same protection if the odds are against them.... The risk of needing health care is the same whether one has insurance or not.
For any given individual, yes, buying or not buying insurance has no effect on your personal risk of needing health care. However, the risk of needing health care, and the expected cost of that care, vary from individual to individual, particularly when you consider pre-existing conditions. Everyone pays the same "little bit", but different people get vastly different returns on that payment.
Spreading the cost of insuring that risk over a larger pool brings down the cost for everybody because a) for those currently uninsured, they can get treatment when needed.
Let's just call this what it is: a handout. Done privately, as charity, this would be fine, but it's not government's role to get involved in such matters.
b) hospitals that would be treating the uninsured know they will get paid and don't have to pass the cost on to the rest of us
They could do this already. Payment up front or good credit, no escaping hospital debts through bankruptcy. Legally they're only required to provide basic emergency care, enough to stabilize the patient. Anything extra they do at their own risk. Competition should prevent them from wasting customer's money acting like a charity, so we should look into the regulations which prevent effective competition in health care.
c) for those already with insurance, the risk is spread over a bigger pool of participants..., thus lowering their costs.
Sure, provided those being added to the pool are low-risk individuals being made to pay more than their fair share. But that's exactly the problem with this scheme... it imposes an external cost on low-risk individuals to subsidize insurance for the rest.
No, goods and services are the economy. Money is just a placeholder, and the act of spending money is merely a rearrangement of goods. Neither are essential; the economy can exist without money, albeit less efficiently. But before you can spend, both you and others must have produced and saved in order to have goods to trade.
It is consumer demand, the desire for consumption, which drives the economy, not consumption itself. Between desire and consumption lies production. Production exists in response to demand, and in turn enables consumption. In order for the economy to grow the capacity for production must increase, which requires saving and investment. The returns from saving (in a deflationary economy) and investment provide the effective consumer demand for the extra goods being produced.
Second, if bitcoins are worth significantly more over time, why would anyone lend money? Good luck running a healthy economy in that currency.
You would lend money because you expect to get back more bitcoins than you lent, obviously. You wouldn't lend only to get back less, even if they're worth more than the larger number you started with, because you could have just held on to the original bitcoins for an even better ROI. That's good, since only below-average investments would have a negative nominal return, and you wouldn't want to bring down the average. (With a fixed currency supply, the rate of deflation matches the average "risk-free" ROI.)
More investment is not always better, particularly when it diverts resources from better investments. With a deliberately inflationary currency this sort of malinvestment is much harder to identify.
"Deferring consumption" is what makes economy grow and that's why you deserve a bigger slice of pie for doing nothing, really now? Silly me, I thought things like building plants, mining ore, growing wheat and making inventions is what makes economy grow.
You already did all that; it's why you have money in the first place. You can offset the positive effect of that production immediately through consumption, or you can leave a surplus for a time (deferring consumption). That surplus—not the money, which is only a proxy, but the goods produced to earn it—can then be invested by yourself or by others in profitable ventures which fuel additional growth. If you simply hold on to your money rather than purchasing something with it, that gives others the opportunity to purchase those goods instead, at lower prices. Essentially, you're loaning them your purchasing power. The increase in value from deflation is your interest on the loan.
If people don't understand even this much, it's no wonder the economy remains a mystery to them.
But thanks to you, now I know! Everyone should stop buying anything except for bare necessities and see the economy skyrocket by the power of all that consumption deferred.
Essentially, yes. If we did stop buying goods for immediate consumption then all our productive capacity could be applied to capital goods. With more capital (i.e. more and better tools), a given investment of labor and materials would produce more than they used to, making people comparatively wealthy.
Obviously people aren't going to defer all their consumption; we have needs and wants which are better satisfied now rather than later, even if they would cost less later. There is a balance to be achieved. However, the people who do choose to defer part of their consumption improve matters for everyone, and fully deserve the increase in purchasing power which accompanies the resulting economic growth.
If 20% of the goods in the store are shoplifted, the store doesn't just eat the loss, it is passed on to customers in higher prices. Reduce shoplifting and prices stabilize.
Sure, if you can reduce shoplifting for free. In practice stores spend money to reduce shoplifting until the marginal cost of shoplifting prevention exceeds the cost of the shoplifting which would be prevented. At that point there's nothing more they can do.
The wealthy are already paying for the uninsured and underinsured. About 20% of healthcare costs go to pay for that.
And all the ACA is doing is shifting those costs around, not actually reducing them. After all, someone still has to pay for health care services rendered, and it isn't going to be those who are currently uninsured. Their insurance is going to be subsidized, probably not by the wealthy so much as by the average middle-class taxpayer.
In addition, with insurance, people will be more likely to get treatment sooner, before many conditions require more drastic and costly courses of action.
This is the only part that would actually reduce health care costs, but I doubt it will reduce costs enough to even offset the overhead of the program, much less make a dent in the average price of health care (inclusive of any taxes and/or subsidies).
And most of that money going to the retired is money that they paid in themselves.
Except that it isn't. That money was loaned to other areas of the government and spent long ago, mostly on things intended to benefit those now retired. The money going to the retired today is coming out of our current paychecks, as our generation is made to pay back what the previous generation borrowed from their retirement funds.
The issue with deflation is that YOU wouldn't give away dollars in exchange for wares. If you know your dollars will be worth more in the future, there's no reason not to sit on them and do nothing.
Here's one reason: you need the wares now, not later. We've had continuous price deflation in the area of electronics for decades, and it hasn't prevented people from buying the new iPhone 5 just because they know there will be an iPhone 6 next year for the same or lower cost.
As for investments, sure, some ventures with a positive, but below-deflation, return will be unlikely to receive funding due to deflation. However, that's a good thing: such investments are really malinvestments, diverting capital away from more profitable ventures. If you can't find an investment with an expected rate of return above the rate of deflation, then both you and society are better off with you holding onto the money and accepting the default rate of return for merely deferring consumption rather than actively directing effort and resources into a below-average investment.
If the economy tries to grow 10% in a year, and would under normal circumstances, assuming there's not already slack in the monetary base, there will not be enough Bitcoins to cover the increased commerce.
It's not the amount of currency in circulation which needs to increase, just the value of the currency. If the economy grows 10% in a year and the number of bitcoins is fixed then each bitcoin will be worth 10% more at the end of the year. The people who saved their money—who deferred consumption, and thus helped the economy to grow by 10%—have 10% more purchasing power, corresponding to the 10% increase in available goods.
None of this has anything to do with Fractional Reserve Banking, which, as you say, is merely an accounting quirk: a way for banks to have more outstanding claims for money on demand than they can actually satisfy. Any bank practicing FRB is technically insolvent, but that doesn't quite cross the line into outright fraud as long as your customers are aware of the situation.
There is nothing to prevent a bank from offering FRB bitcoin accounts, but the level of reserves required depends on the degree to which the bank can keep transfers confined within the system. I don't see very much incentive for people to leave their bitcoins in bank accounts and accept off-blockchain account-to-account transfers in place of actual bitcoins when an encrypted private wallet offers a similar or greater degree of security and convenience.
[Shortage] can be treated as more or less synonymous with cost, higher is less supply, lower is more.
If you have a shortage, it means that effective demand at the current price exceeds the supply. This situation can only persist if something is preventing the price from adjusting according to the law of supply and demand. Normally that "something" would be some form of price ceiling; this is why price ceilings are generally associated with rationing.
If the price adjusts such that supply and demand reach a balance (no rationing) then you don't have a shortage; the commodity is just more expensive than it used to be, or than buyers would like it to be.
Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore...
on
Did NIST Cripple SHA-3?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It appears that the most difficult part of cryptography is key management.
You could say that key management is the only really difficult problem in cryptography. If it weren't for the key management problem we'd all be using one-time pads, which are both trivial to implement and provably unbreakable, even by brute force. Unfortunately, to use them each pair of individuals must first securely exchange keys at least as large as all the messages they'll ever want to send.
Symmetric crypto algorithms exist to cut down on the amount of key material which must be exchanged by reusing the key, while asymmetric crypto addresses the N^2 problem by allowing many-to-one communication with a single public/private key pair. Both accept the risk of cryptoanalysis in exchange for more convenient key management.
Who told you the stock market was a zero sum game? (Hint: It's not).
There is no input other than the Ponzi effect.
If you're measuring the market in terms of wealth or value rather than dollars, it clearly isn't zero-sum because resources are worth more when they're allocated properly. Even if you choose to measure the market in terms of dollars, however, it's hardly a closed system. Dollars enter and leave the market all the time in response to changing prices and external events. A given trade may be zero-sum, or it may increase or decrease the size of the market, making it positive- or negative-sum. Looking further, changes in the size of the market mean changes in the amount of investment, and thus capital goods, and thus overall productivity, another non-zero-sum effect. Low liquidity and high spreads, in particular, scare off even long-term investors; even if you plan to hold an investment for years, you may need to sell it on short notice, and would prefer a reasonably stable market price.
But should it really be the first thing that comes up?
If it's what you're searching for, yes.
If not, then it's not as if Google wants to bring up obsolete or irrelevant information. If they had a way to distinguish between the pages documenting your adolescent follies and more recent and pertinent data, they would do so already. There's too much data to reasonably rely on human curators for everything, and too much potential for bias in skewing the results selectively to suit how people want others to see them. Fortunately, the machines are getting better at interpreting searches and picking the right results.
I believe artists should be able to monetize the dozens of hours and materials they spend to create a work we can share at the push of a button.
I agree completely. They just need to do it before they distribute the work. Once it's been distributed, short of an (impractical) NDA, it's out of their hands.
I would suggest a Kickstarter campaign. Set a target for public release under an open license, e.g. CC-BY-SA. Offer some bonuses, like signed prints—or whatever is appropriate for your medium—for serious backers. Post some watermarked thumbnail images so people know what they're getting. When and if the target is reached, distribute full-quality copies to all the backers.
That would only work if you were OK with the buy / don't buy signal being random. It's true that once you examine your own particle you immediately know the state of the other, but that information was present in your particle from the beginning as a consequence of the entanglement, not transferred FTL at the instant it was observed. Entanglement links the states of the particles, but you have no way of knowing which is which so long as they remain entangled.
So far as I know, the only known application of quantum entanglement to communications is quantum cryptography, where entangled particles are used to securely produce identical copies of the same one-time pad. However, the pad is random—there is no way to control the result, only measure it. You still need a classical, slower-than-light communication channel to actually exchange data.
2. Hyperinflation and deflation both tend to destroy the real economy.
The second part of this is a myth. The example always used here, the Great Depression, is basically the only known case where deflation was correlated with a recession or depression. This is because it was not simply a decrease in prices, but a gigantic credit contraction as people realized that most of the money they thought they had didn't really exist. The credit contraction—an inevitable result of fractional-reserve banking practices taken to extremes—caused both the depression and the deflation, not the other way around. There are plenty of examples of deflation in other contexts where no recession occurred.
Recessions are the correction phases following wide-scale malinvestment. Explicitly inflationary or deflationary policies are among the more obvious ways to cause malinvestment on a broad scale, though they're hardly the only ones. There is nothing to fear from natural inflation or deflation which results from a change in the demand for money; on the contrary, both are essential price signals regarding the balance between saving and consumption.
You could make the same argument in favor of "stabilizing" the price of any other commodity, and it would be just as wrong there is it is concerning price controls on money. Life is change. Attempts to guarantee "stability" do nothing but ensure malinvestment as people respond to corrupted price signals, making things that much worse when the controls are inevitably discovered to be untenable.
There were recessions and crashes before the Federal Reserve, but they were the result of external shocks (or political blunders, like trying, and failing, to prop up the Bank of England with massive loans), not systemic, predictable malinvestment as in the case of the Great Depression or the lesser boom/bust cycles which have occurred since. Moreover, while the pre-Fed crashes may have been sharper, they were resolved more quickly and with less net impact on the average citizen.
While the change in *my* paycheck may lag or lead changes in GDP, the aggregate income of everybody must exactly match those changes at the exact same time, by definition.... If there is overall inflation, and I am not seeing an increase in my paycheck, then somebody else must be seeing that increase in their paycheck/wages/income, or else GDP != GDI which is not possible.
Indeed. I'm not disputing that. However, the distribution is not random; it favors those close to the source of the inflation. The people responsible for the inflation get a "raise" first. Assuming you're not among the politically well-connected, their spending has already bid up prices by the time the extra money makes it to your paycheck. The effect of supply-side inflation is to transfer wealth from the commoners to the political class.
Frankly, I don't think it matters much what language you learn in...they all have their idiosyncrocies, but, with few exceptions (looking at you LISP) they are mostly the same
LISP isn't really all that different from other multiparadigm procedural languages like C++ or Java, particularly now that both are getting first-class anonymous functions. It's mainly the culture which places it in the functional programming camp, not the language per se. If you want to see something different, try Haskell (pure functional) or Prolog (declarative), languages which really force you to take a new approach to programming.
If more people realized that "inflation" doesn't mean that a gallon of milk costs more, it means that you will see a nominal rise in your paycheck, it wouldn't be such a boogeyman.
It means both. However, whether you're talking about inflation or deflation, the change in your paycheck always trails the effect on the price of consumer goods, so a gallon of milk still costs more relative to your current paycheck. Under deflation it's just the opposite: sure, your paycheck is decreasing, but your expenses are decreasing even faster.
This is not to say that we'd be better off with forced deflation rather than inflation. As with any other commodity, the price of money is best left to the market rather than central planners. Natural deflation is a signal that there is a need for saving and investment, while inflation signals that it's time to spend. Forcing either results in a suboptimal allocation of resources.
If one wants a "store of value" such as precious metal, then wouldn't purchasing a dollar's worth of gold be a better approach than complaining that the dollar itself wasn't up to the job?
Sure, except for a couple of minor issue. First, you're going to be taxed on the change in the nominal dollar price of the gold, even though the change is due to the dollar losing value, not the gold gaining value—never mind the extra paperwork involved. Second, all your internal accounting and external contracts are probably still denominated in dollars, which complicates any attempt at rational economic calculation. You can try to compensate, but calculating the right index is far from easy. (It's not just the change in prices.) Finally, even if you were to personally avoid the dollar entirely, that won't fix the effect of supply-side manipulation on the rest of the economy. Inflation and deflation are price signals relating to the balance between saving and consumption; messing with those signals has much the same effect as price controls, except that when it's the price of the currency which is being controlled, the effects are felt everywhere, not just in a narrow range of commodities.
A "free" market requires "absolute" property, and that most definitely regulates my choice to lie on "your" lawn.
Naturally, because your choice to lie on my lawn is also a choice regarding the use of my lawn, which is properly my decision as the owner, not yours. Either way the choice of how to use the lawn must lie with someone (or it can never be used); there is no reason why that choice should belong to you, as opposed to the one who invested their own efforts and resources into purchasing and/or cultivating the property.
Property rights are inherent in nature due to scarcity. They are not a consequence of free markets; someone must have the (necessarily exclusive) right to consume the property, which at the point of consumption makes them the de facto property owner. The only question is how to assign ownership, and the free market is the only answer to that question which is both practical and equitable—which both allows the property to be used, and applies the same rules to everyone without exception or bias.
Is free market supposed to solve the problem of antibiotic development? Note; its a lot better for the pharmacy companies to develop new medications for chronic conditions, very very profitable. Antibiotics are very unprofitable for them. Because of this there haven't been major developments in antibiotics since the '80s.
And you think this is the result of a free market? The incentive for pharmaceutical companies are mostly determined by the rules surrounding patents, which also play a role in inhibiting R&D by anyone other than the established pharmacy companies whose interests, as you say, do not always align with those of patients. State-granted monopolies like patents are the antithesis of a free market.
Without patents R&D would have to be funded separately from the manufacturing and distribution of pharmaceuticals, and for the most part would be in the hands of the patients themselves, eliminating the conflict of interest.
Property and contract law do not limit your ability to make choices for yourself in any way. They do limit your ability to make choices for others, but then, doing so would also take away their ability to make their own choices, so it's not like the overall ability to choose is decreasing. It's just being placed where it belongs, with those most affected.
Somehow I'm doubting that a homeless man has all these digital toys, yet, didn't give those up to avoid being "homeless".
If he sold all his "toys" (which are tools he uses to earn actual money) they would perhaps fetch a few months' rent in a cheap apartment. Then what?
What you're suggesting amounts to consuming capital. Rather than giving up his tools, he needs to find a way to use them more productively than getting paid pennies per hour to stare at ads. That may or may not involve Bitcoin, though the ability to easily send and receive payments worldwide should certainly open up some new opportunities for the enterprising individual.
Slashdot Mirror
There has to be a reason why the GOP pushed the exchanges before Obama was in office.
I have no problem with opening up the market for health insurance and separating it (voluntarily, of course) from employment. That situation would never have existed in the first place if it weren't for the price controls on labor during the New Deal era, which left employers looking for ways to bundle extra benefits in lieu of increasing wages. My objections to the ACA lie with the "individual mandate" and the extra requirements placed on insurers, like the requirement to ignore pre-existing conditions.
... everybody pays a little bit and everybody has the same protection if the odds are against them. ... The risk of needing health care is the same whether one has insurance or not.
For any given individual, yes, buying or not buying insurance has no effect on your personal risk of needing health care. However, the risk of needing health care, and the expected cost of that care, vary from individual to individual, particularly when you consider pre-existing conditions. Everyone pays the same "little bit", but different people get vastly different returns on that payment.
Spreading the cost of insuring that risk over a larger pool brings down the cost for everybody because a) for those currently uninsured, they can get treatment when needed.
Let's just call this what it is: a handout. Done privately, as charity, this would be fine, but it's not government's role to get involved in such matters.
b) hospitals that would be treating the uninsured know they will get paid and don't have to pass the cost on to the rest of us
They could do this already. Payment up front or good credit, no escaping hospital debts through bankruptcy. Legally they're only required to provide basic emergency care, enough to stabilize the patient. Anything extra they do at their own risk. Competition should prevent them from wasting customer's money acting like a charity, so we should look into the regulations which prevent effective competition in health care.
c) for those already with insurance, the risk is spread over a bigger pool of participants ..., thus lowering their costs.
Sure, provided those being added to the pool are low-risk individuals being made to pay more than their fair share. But that's exactly the problem with this scheme... it imposes an external cost on low-risk individuals to subsidize insurance for the rest.
Spent money _IS_ the economy.
No, goods and services are the economy. Money is just a placeholder, and the act of spending money is merely a rearrangement of goods. Neither are essential; the economy can exist without money, albeit less efficiently. But before you can spend, both you and others must have produced and saved in order to have goods to trade.
It is consumer demand, the desire for consumption, which drives the economy, not consumption itself. Between desire and consumption lies production. Production exists in response to demand, and in turn enables consumption. In order for the economy to grow the capacity for production must increase, which requires saving and investment. The returns from saving (in a deflationary economy) and investment provide the effective consumer demand for the extra goods being produced.
Second, if bitcoins are worth significantly more over time, why would anyone lend money? Good luck running a healthy economy in that currency.
You would lend money because you expect to get back more bitcoins than you lent, obviously. You wouldn't lend only to get back less, even if they're worth more than the larger number you started with, because you could have just held on to the original bitcoins for an even better ROI. That's good, since only below-average investments would have a negative nominal return, and you wouldn't want to bring down the average. (With a fixed currency supply, the rate of deflation matches the average "risk-free" ROI.)
More investment is not always better, particularly when it diverts resources from better investments. With a deliberately inflationary currency this sort of malinvestment is much harder to identify.
"Deferring consumption" is what makes economy grow and that's why you deserve a bigger slice of pie for doing nothing, really now? Silly me, I thought things like building plants, mining ore, growing wheat and making inventions is what makes economy grow.
You already did all that; it's why you have money in the first place. You can offset the positive effect of that production immediately through consumption, or you can leave a surplus for a time (deferring consumption). That surplus—not the money, which is only a proxy, but the goods produced to earn it—can then be invested by yourself or by others in profitable ventures which fuel additional growth. If you simply hold on to your money rather than purchasing something with it, that gives others the opportunity to purchase those goods instead, at lower prices. Essentially, you're loaning them your purchasing power. The increase in value from deflation is your interest on the loan.
If people don't understand even this much, it's no wonder the economy remains a mystery to them.
But thanks to you, now I know! Everyone should stop buying anything except for bare necessities and see the economy skyrocket by the power of all that consumption deferred.
Essentially, yes. If we did stop buying goods for immediate consumption then all our productive capacity could be applied to capital goods. With more capital (i.e. more and better tools), a given investment of labor and materials would produce more than they used to, making people comparatively wealthy.
Obviously people aren't going to defer all their consumption; we have needs and wants which are better satisfied now rather than later, even if they would cost less later. There is a balance to be achieved. However, the people who do choose to defer part of their consumption improve matters for everyone, and fully deserve the increase in purchasing power which accompanies the resulting economic growth.
If 20% of the goods in the store are shoplifted, the store doesn't just eat the loss, it is passed on to customers in higher prices. Reduce shoplifting and prices stabilize.
Sure, if you can reduce shoplifting for free. In practice stores spend money to reduce shoplifting until the marginal cost of shoplifting prevention exceeds the cost of the shoplifting which would be prevented. At that point there's nothing more they can do.
The wealthy are already paying for the uninsured and underinsured. About 20% of healthcare costs go to pay for that.
And all the ACA is doing is shifting those costs around, not actually reducing them. After all, someone still has to pay for health care services rendered, and it isn't going to be those who are currently uninsured. Their insurance is going to be subsidized, probably not by the wealthy so much as by the average middle-class taxpayer.
In addition, with insurance, people will be more likely to get treatment sooner, before many conditions require more drastic and costly courses of action.
This is the only part that would actually reduce health care costs, but I doubt it will reduce costs enough to even offset the overhead of the program, much less make a dent in the average price of health care (inclusive of any taxes and/or subsidies).
And most of that money going to the retired is money that they paid in themselves.
Except that it isn't. That money was loaned to other areas of the government and spent long ago, mostly on things intended to benefit those now retired. The money going to the retired today is coming out of our current paychecks, as our generation is made to pay back what the previous generation borrowed from their retirement funds.
When will we see a postive story about Bitcoin's usefulness? Oh right, there really ISN'T any news on that front.
There is news on that front; it just doesn't get reported here as often.
The issue with deflation is that YOU wouldn't give away dollars in exchange for wares. If you know your dollars will be worth more in the future, there's no reason not to sit on them and do nothing.
Here's one reason: you need the wares now, not later. We've had continuous price deflation in the area of electronics for decades, and it hasn't prevented people from buying the new iPhone 5 just because they know there will be an iPhone 6 next year for the same or lower cost.
As for investments, sure, some ventures with a positive, but below-deflation, return will be unlikely to receive funding due to deflation. However, that's a good thing: such investments are really malinvestments, diverting capital away from more profitable ventures. If you can't find an investment with an expected rate of return above the rate of deflation, then both you and society are better off with you holding onto the money and accepting the default rate of return for merely deferring consumption rather than actively directing effort and resources into a below-average investment.
If the economy tries to grow 10% in a year, and would under normal circumstances, assuming there's not already slack in the monetary base, there will not be enough Bitcoins to cover the increased commerce.
It's not the amount of currency in circulation which needs to increase, just the value of the currency. If the economy grows 10% in a year and the number of bitcoins is fixed then each bitcoin will be worth 10% more at the end of the year. The people who saved their money—who deferred consumption, and thus helped the economy to grow by 10%—have 10% more purchasing power, corresponding to the 10% increase in available goods.
None of this has anything to do with Fractional Reserve Banking, which, as you say, is merely an accounting quirk: a way for banks to have more outstanding claims for money on demand than they can actually satisfy. Any bank practicing FRB is technically insolvent, but that doesn't quite cross the line into outright fraud as long as your customers are aware of the situation.
There is nothing to prevent a bank from offering FRB bitcoin accounts, but the level of reserves required depends on the degree to which the bank can keep transfers confined within the system. I don't see very much incentive for people to leave their bitcoins in bank accounts and accept off-blockchain account-to-account transfers in place of actual bitcoins when an encrypted private wallet offers a similar or greater degree of security and convenience.
[Shortage] can be treated as more or less synonymous with cost, higher is less supply, lower is more.
If you have a shortage, it means that effective demand at the current price exceeds the supply. This situation can only persist if something is preventing the price from adjusting according to the law of supply and demand. Normally that "something" would be some form of price ceiling; this is why price ceilings are generally associated with rationing.
If the price adjusts such that supply and demand reach a balance (no rationing) then you don't have a shortage; the commodity is just more expensive than it used to be, or than buyers would like it to be.
It appears that the most difficult part of cryptography is key management.
You could say that key management is the only really difficult problem in cryptography. If it weren't for the key management problem we'd all be using one-time pads, which are both trivial to implement and provably unbreakable, even by brute force. Unfortunately, to use them each pair of individuals must first securely exchange keys at least as large as all the messages they'll ever want to send.
Symmetric crypto algorithms exist to cut down on the amount of key material which must be exchanged by reusing the key, while asymmetric crypto addresses the N^2 problem by allowing many-to-one communication with a single public/private key pair. Both accept the risk of cryptoanalysis in exchange for more convenient key management.
Who told you the stock market was a zero sum game? (Hint: It's not).
There is no input other than the Ponzi effect.
If you're measuring the market in terms of wealth or value rather than dollars, it clearly isn't zero-sum because resources are worth more when they're allocated properly. Even if you choose to measure the market in terms of dollars, however, it's hardly a closed system. Dollars enter and leave the market all the time in response to changing prices and external events. A given trade may be zero-sum, or it may increase or decrease the size of the market, making it positive- or negative-sum. Looking further, changes in the size of the market mean changes in the amount of investment, and thus capital goods, and thus overall productivity, another non-zero-sum effect. Low liquidity and high spreads, in particular, scare off even long-term investors; even if you plan to hold an investment for years, you may need to sell it on short notice, and would prefer a reasonably stable market price.
But should it really be the first thing that comes up?
If it's what you're searching for, yes.
If not, then it's not as if Google wants to bring up obsolete or irrelevant information. If they had a way to distinguish between the pages documenting your adolescent follies and more recent and pertinent data, they would do so already. There's too much data to reasonably rely on human curators for everything, and too much potential for bias in skewing the results selectively to suit how people want others to see them. Fortunately, the machines are getting better at interpreting searches and picking the right results.
I believe artists should be able to monetize the dozens of hours and materials they spend to create a work we can share at the push of a button.
I agree completely. They just need to do it before they distribute the work. Once it's been distributed, short of an (impractical) NDA, it's out of their hands.
I would suggest a Kickstarter campaign. Set a target for public release under an open license, e.g. CC-BY-SA. Offer some bonuses, like signed prints—or whatever is appropriate for your medium—for serious backers. Post some watermarked thumbnail images so people know what they're getting. When and if the target is reached, distribute full-quality copies to all the backers.
How do you know which one "settled" first without observing both particles yourself, thus defeating the whole point of the exercise?
That would only work if you were OK with the buy / don't buy signal being random. It's true that once you examine your own particle you immediately know the state of the other, but that information was present in your particle from the beginning as a consequence of the entanglement, not transferred FTL at the instant it was observed. Entanglement links the states of the particles, but you have no way of knowing which is which so long as they remain entangled.
So far as I know, the only known application of quantum entanglement to communications is quantum cryptography, where entangled particles are used to securely produce identical copies of the same one-time pad. However, the pad is random—there is no way to control the result, only measure it. You still need a classical, slower-than-light communication channel to actually exchange data.
2. Hyperinflation and deflation both tend to destroy the real economy.
The second part of this is a myth. The example always used here, the Great Depression, is basically the only known case where deflation was correlated with a recession or depression. This is because it was not simply a decrease in prices, but a gigantic credit contraction as people realized that most of the money they thought they had didn't really exist. The credit contraction—an inevitable result of fractional-reserve banking practices taken to extremes—caused both the depression and the deflation, not the other way around. There are plenty of examples of deflation in other contexts where no recession occurred.
Recessions are the correction phases following wide-scale malinvestment. Explicitly inflationary or deflationary policies are among the more obvious ways to cause malinvestment on a broad scale, though they're hardly the only ones. There is nothing to fear from natural inflation or deflation which results from a change in the demand for money; on the contrary, both are essential price signals regarding the balance between saving and consumption.
You could make the same argument in favor of "stabilizing" the price of any other commodity, and it would be just as wrong there is it is concerning price controls on money. Life is change. Attempts to guarantee "stability" do nothing but ensure malinvestment as people respond to corrupted price signals, making things that much worse when the controls are inevitably discovered to be untenable.
There were recessions and crashes before the Federal Reserve, but they were the result of external shocks (or political blunders, like trying, and failing, to prop up the Bank of England with massive loans), not systemic, predictable malinvestment as in the case of the Great Depression or the lesser boom/bust cycles which have occurred since. Moreover, while the pre-Fed crashes may have been sharper, they were resolved more quickly and with less net impact on the average citizen.
While the change in *my* paycheck may lag or lead changes in GDP, the aggregate income of everybody must exactly match those changes at the exact same time, by definition. ... If there is overall inflation, and I am not seeing an increase in my paycheck, then somebody else must be seeing that increase in their paycheck/wages/income, or else GDP != GDI which is not possible.
Indeed. I'm not disputing that. However, the distribution is not random; it favors those close to the source of the inflation. The people responsible for the inflation get a "raise" first. Assuming you're not among the politically well-connected, their spending has already bid up prices by the time the extra money makes it to your paycheck. The effect of supply-side inflation is to transfer wealth from the commoners to the political class.
Frankly, I don't think it matters much what language you learn in...they all have their idiosyncrocies, but, with few exceptions (looking at you LISP) they are mostly the same
LISP isn't really all that different from other multiparadigm procedural languages like C++ or Java, particularly now that both are getting first-class anonymous functions. It's mainly the culture which places it in the functional programming camp, not the language per se. If you want to see something different, try Haskell (pure functional) or Prolog (declarative), languages which really force you to take a new approach to programming.
If more people realized that "inflation" doesn't mean that a gallon of milk costs more, it means that you will see a nominal rise in your paycheck, it wouldn't be such a boogeyman.
It means both. However, whether you're talking about inflation or deflation, the change in your paycheck always trails the effect on the price of consumer goods, so a gallon of milk still costs more relative to your current paycheck. Under deflation it's just the opposite: sure, your paycheck is decreasing, but your expenses are decreasing even faster.
This is not to say that we'd be better off with forced deflation rather than inflation. As with any other commodity, the price of money is best left to the market rather than central planners. Natural deflation is a signal that there is a need for saving and investment, while inflation signals that it's time to spend. Forcing either results in a suboptimal allocation of resources.
If one wants a "store of value" such as precious metal, then wouldn't purchasing a dollar's worth of gold be a better approach than complaining that the dollar itself wasn't up to the job?
Sure, except for a couple of minor issue. First, you're going to be taxed on the change in the nominal dollar price of the gold, even though the change is due to the dollar losing value, not the gold gaining value—never mind the extra paperwork involved. Second, all your internal accounting and external contracts are probably still denominated in dollars, which complicates any attempt at rational economic calculation. You can try to compensate, but calculating the right index is far from easy. (It's not just the change in prices.) Finally, even if you were to personally avoid the dollar entirely, that won't fix the effect of supply-side manipulation on the rest of the economy. Inflation and deflation are price signals relating to the balance between saving and consumption; messing with those signals has much the same effect as price controls, except that when it's the price of the currency which is being controlled, the effects are felt everywhere, not just in a narrow range of commodities.
A "free" market requires "absolute" property, and that most definitely regulates my choice to lie on "your" lawn.
Naturally, because your choice to lie on my lawn is also a choice regarding the use of my lawn, which is properly my decision as the owner, not yours. Either way the choice of how to use the lawn must lie with someone (or it can never be used); there is no reason why that choice should belong to you, as opposed to the one who invested their own efforts and resources into purchasing and/or cultivating the property.
Property rights are inherent in nature due to scarcity. They are not a consequence of free markets; someone must have the (necessarily exclusive) right to consume the property, which at the point of consumption makes them the de facto property owner. The only question is how to assign ownership, and the free market is the only answer to that question which is both practical and equitable—which both allows the property to be used, and applies the same rules to everyone without exception or bias.
Is free market supposed to solve the problem of antibiotic development? Note; its a lot better for the pharmacy companies to develop new medications for chronic conditions, very very profitable. Antibiotics are very unprofitable for them. Because of this there haven't been major developments in antibiotics since the '80s.
And you think this is the result of a free market? The incentive for pharmaceutical companies are mostly determined by the rules surrounding patents, which also play a role in inhibiting R&D by anyone other than the established pharmacy companies whose interests, as you say, do not always align with those of patients. State-granted monopolies like patents are the antithesis of a free market.
Without patents R&D would have to be funded separately from the manufacturing and distribution of pharmaceuticals, and for the most part would be in the hands of the patients themselves, eliminating the conflict of interest.
Property and contract law do not limit your ability to make choices for yourself in any way. They do limit your ability to make choices for others, but then, doing so would also take away their ability to make their own choices, so it's not like the overall ability to choose is decreasing. It's just being placed where it belongs, with those most affected.
Somehow I'm doubting that a homeless man has all these digital toys, yet, didn't give those up to avoid being "homeless".
If he sold all his "toys" (which are tools he uses to earn actual money) they would perhaps fetch a few months' rent in a cheap apartment. Then what?
What you're suggesting amounts to consuming capital. Rather than giving up his tools, he needs to find a way to use them more productively than getting paid pennies per hour to stare at ads. That may or may not involve Bitcoin, though the ability to easily send and receive payments worldwide should certainly open up some new opportunities for the enterprising individual.