Like licensing, Yucca Mountain is a perfect example of requirements dictated by politics. If you want to make nuclear waste storage impossibly expensive, then smart minds will find a way to make it that way. Government contractors are more than happy to help out with that as well.
There is no reason such an elaborate storage solution is required. Just find reasonably adequate accommodations and lock it all up. If in 10,000 years there is a geologic change, then move it. It is a LOT cheaper to spend a little money now and a little money in 10,000 years than to try to spend a huge fortune today to prevent some issue from happing eons in the future. If you're concerned about the cleanup costs 100k years from now go ahead and deposit a penny in a mutual fund and there won't be any problems. If you put it in T-bills by then your descendants will own the USA.
Mostly due to rediculous standards. They want to store it in a site that won't change on geological timescales. Why not just put the material in containers which make it easy to repackage it from time to time, and which are easy to retransport. In 1000 years if there is an ice age you just ship the collection someplace else.
The retort is "how do you know that civilization won't collapse in 1000 years, eliminating the ability to transport the waste?" I think this is just a bit far-fetched. If that happens then lions and wolves will be a bigger hazard to the average American of 3010 than some radioactive seepage from some abandoned mine.
The thing that drives me nuts is that you aren't entitled to a trial by jury unless you're facing at least six months in prison on a single count. However, in civil trials either party is entitled to a trial by jury if the amount in dispute is over $20. So, you can put somebody in prison for 10 years by charging them with 30 counts with a sentence of 4 months per count and they don't get a jury trial. However, if you break your friend's video game you can drag them in front of a jury to duke it out.
Does that seem just a little out of whack to anybody else? IMHO people should be entitled to a jury trial for any offence whatsoever. By all means have them pay a fee for the jury's time if they are found guilty (loser pays system), but maybe we'd have fewer silly 25mph speed zones if juries had to agree to the fines.
Likewise the state should have to reimburse the accused for lost time when they're found innocent of a crime. These days simply being accused of a crime and having the gall to defend yourself is about all it takes to face financial ruin.
Indeed, it is REALLY stupid police practice as well for a number of reasons.
1. Innocent bystander sees a man pulling a gun and pointing it at somebody who is unarmed (no idea if the gun was aimed or not in this case, but ignore that for this argument). In theory if they have a gun they should be allowed to just shoot the cop, since they aren't identified as such and somebody's life is potentially in imminent danger. Good luck to the poor SOB who tries this, though.
2. An actual law-enforcement agent (cop (on- or off-duty), FBI agent, whatever) witnesses the same thing, and shouts a warning, and then if the unidentified cop flinches the wrong way they get shot. This is EXACTLY how the cops would handle a random person pointing a gun at somebody, and no doubt how this unidentified cop would get handled. Suddenly the thin blue line doesn't help out much.
Out-of-uniform cops are a bad idea most of the time in general, for a lot of reasons. Out-of-uniform cops pointing guns at people is DEFINITELY a bad thing. It is bad for many reasons, the very least of which is that the cop could end up getting shot.
Sorry - make that "extremely similar" - not difficult. Rooting an itouch and rooting an iphone are pretty equivalent from an impact standpoint for all parties involved.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'd think that the presence of the phone exemption would probably be considered by the court if anybody were sued over the itouch. Since the two "infringements" are otherwise extremely difficult it would be difficult for the court to construe that one ought to be legal and the other illegal.
I suspect that Apple wouldn't push something like this to court anyway - the ambiguity is worth a lot more to them than a flat out ruling against them.
Agreed. I'd envision the secure "credit card" of the future having the following mechanism of operation:
1. You interface the card with a computer (via USB, acoustic modem for phone, one-wire, etc). 2. The remote party sends the card a packet with who is to be payed (in the form of a bank certificate), and how much, and whether any kind of recurring transaction is authorized (with details on that if applicable). 3. The card displays the transaction info on a display built into the card. 4. The user approves the transaction by hitting an approve button and typing in a PIN using a keypad on the card. 5. The card generates a certificate and sends it back to the remote party. 6. The remote party confirms successful receipt of the certificate to the card.
The remote party and the card communicate by SSL (using bank-signed certificates), so no MITM, although the algorithm should be fairly invulnerable to MITM anyway.
If there is a transmission error the remote party just asks for a retransmission any time until step 6. The card and the bank would both spot likely duplications. You couldn't spoof the merchant name (Gooogle Innc) or anything like that since it comes via a bank certificate. Nothing is trusted outside the card itself, so no risk of trojans/etc.
All it needs is a credit card with a battery, display, keypad, and small CPU optimized for crypto. I can't imagine that these are more expensive to produce than the cost of bank fraud.
You could even have cards that function as digital wallets, handling multiple banks, government IDs, etc. All it takes are some standards, and the right CAs for the right data items.
Agreed. In fact, as long as the big company has no liability it just turns into one big race for the bottom.
Suppose you run a reputable oil-rig operations company. You'd like to have people outsource their rigs to you. You believe in safety and the environment, so you take all kinds of steps to avoid something like the BP disaster. What happens? Well, you go out of business. You have to compete against other companies that cut corners. Companies like BP don't care about the safety of your workers or the environment, since that is on you. Your competitors charge less, and that is all they care about. Sure, it isn't sustainable, but most small companies aren't sustainable. The company running the rig can pay out dividends while the money is there, and then fold when the lawsuits hit. Indeed, if you didn't run a disreputable company your shareholders would probably fire you (low dividends compared to peers) and replace you with somebody who would mismanage it.
In other industries there is a clear assignment of responsibility, which cannot be outsourced. You can hire somebody else to do the work, but not to assume the liability. If Bayer sells a bottle of tainted aspirin, then they're liable even if they bought bad pills from a supplier. The only thing they're not liable for is what happens to the package after they sell it to the warehouse/store, although they are required to put the pills in tamper-evident packaging.
Indeed, in many industries liability is personal. That's why certified engineers have to sign off on bridges - they are personally responsible for the design (but not necessarily the implementation). I think the EU does something similar for drugs.
Re:United States Government Accountability Office?
on
Top Secret America
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· Score: 1
I don't have a big problem with government-subsidized communications infrastructure (broadband, TV, mail, roads, etc). I think it is a stretch to call that a subsidized press. The difference is that content isn't being looked at when you subsidize the mail.
Sure, by making mail cheap you can mail magazines with scandalous articles more easily, but you can also mail catalogs or letters cheaply too. If only some people can get the subsidy, then now you open the door to censorship.
Now, paying the reporters directly really seems like a bad idea if you want real oversight.
You don't keep kicking him for three minutes just like you don't pull out a gun and start shooting him once he's already down.
So, the reason cops aren't supposed to shoot people when they're down is because their only purpose is to stop and detain somebody, and then the justice system takes over. The punishment is inflicted by making them spend years of their life behind bars, or whatever is appropriate.
However, in this case there would be no punishment. That bully would be free to resume his bullying once he was able to stand up again. Teachers would separate them, and then the victim has to hope that the bully gives up and doesn't try to ambush him sometime.
So, the solution was to ensure that the attack was punitive in nature, and not merely a gesture. Now, clearly that doesn't need to involve nearly killing somebody, but frankly to be effective it probably has to be a pretty solid beating - enough to require hospitalization. I can't see a typical bully responding to any less. If the guy had a free pass then it is in his interest to make the most of it.
Do I think that victims should be beating up bullies? Of course not - schools should be reigning them in and punishing them severely enough to act as an effective deterrent. Maybe that is just scaring them in front of a judge, or threatening their parents with a $25k fine, or maybe sending the 13-year-old-terror into incarceration for six months. I don't know what it takes, but the least punishment likely to be effective should be employed.
The alternative is that some kids go on to be bullied, suffering psychological damage. Maybe they hold it in, end up hating people, and then become psychopathic CEOs determined to make a buck at any cost without any regard for society (the society that showed no regard for them). Maybe they get over it. Maybe they lash out and beat the tar out of the bully. Or, perhaps they come into school with weapons and kill a few dozen of the children and teachers who sat by and did nothing. Most of these outcomes are completely unacceptable, and the only one that is tolerable is far from ideal.
The bottom line is that you can't just look the other way when somebody treats others like crap. Sooner or later you get to deal with the consequences, and it may not be pretty.
Agreed, although with legal costs being what they are I think loser-pays does need one adjustment.
When the compliant gets filed in court, before anybody spends a dime doing anything (besides filing the complaint itself), the court should determine what the reasonable attorney fees are for the case. Each side can then spend only that much, and is only liable for that much. Otherwise you again end up with an arms race where everybody wants to outspend the other, or be on the hook for huge legal bills the other party unnecessarily incurred.
I think a good way to look at it is that the RIAA is essentially at war.
War isn't about return-on-investment. If anything it is about the opposite.
I want you to do something. You don't want to do it. I show that I'm willing to spend $10M ruining somebody else's life with no real gain to myself because they refused to do what I want you to do. Then I ask again if you're sure you don't want to do it.
When the real Mafia blows up somebody's store, they aren't doing it to gain revenue from that store (face it, that store won't have any more revenue). They do it to continue to collect revenue from every other store on that block.
The success or failure of the RIAA's actions isn't measured by how much they collect from the people they sue. It is measured by how much they collect from the people they don't sue.
Hey - I don't like any of this either, but the people running the show at the RIAA know exactly what they're doing.
Of course, in the litigious US, the Trolley Problem has a very straightforward optimal solution - run and hope nobody got a photo of you. It wouldn't surprise me if you could get sued for taking either course of action.
From a purely utilitarian point of view, executing anybody who is likely to consume more than they produce over the remainder of their life is a net-positive for society. That is almost exactly the definition of fascism.
I'm sorry, if some guy goes out and kills somebody, I can't do anything about that but try to catch him. However, if I support a law that lets my government kill innocent people as long as it is likely that they'll have a net savings of life then I'm the one with blood on my hands.
I'm not even really a big opponent of the death penalty. However, clearly it can't be applied in a utilitarian way.
Great, then the local town can levy a tax and finish it. Nobody has a problem with the town building a bridge to nowhere. The problem is that when you ask others to pay for it...
Yeah, well, MB and GB are generally deprecated as well, at least in the way that most here like to use them. Good luck with your karma if you bring that up, though!
Well, how many people have $10k in the bank, and a $250k mortgage, a $15k car loan, and $20k on their credit cards? They each have almost a 30:1 ratio, so for each person like that you need several people with a more modest 10:1 ratio.
The average american is WAY in debt. That means that even at 20:1 there is plenty of demand for loans to go around.
There it is, the same bullshit meme that gets trotted out by every special interest whose agenda might be derailed by the truth.
Ok, we disagree, so I must be a "special interest." As if anybody on the planet is motivated solely by the benefit of all of humanity with no regard to personal well-being.
The fact of the matter is that there is no bias in research whose funding does not depend on a particular result or conclusion, e.g. the vast majority of academic research.
Uh, explain academic misconduct then? I'm sure that for every case that is uncovered a million get missed. Even Gregor Mendel is suspected of cooking his results. That basically results in confirmation bias. When it comes to public funding, results that suggest that a problem exists are more likely to lead to funding than results that suggest that a problem does not exist. If you conclude that asteroid 123X definitely won't hit earth, chances are you won't get funded to continue observing 123X, but if you're the foremost expert on 123X or own the best telescope for observing it, then it certainly wouldn't hurt your budget if the results suggested that 123X might be at risk of impacting Washington DC.
Oil companies, big pharma, etc., anyone with enough cash to buy control of the funding process, and the truth gets thrown under the bus.
Well, for the most part I suspect that most studies with biased funding probably tend to be honest with regard to the results they actually publish - that is they don't just make up results. The problem is with negative results. If a special interest funds 50 studies, and half confirm a result, and half contradict it, you'll end up with 25 studies with the desired outcome in the literature. However, academic research can be vulnerable to the same kinds of influences.
So..., what well-funded group is paying for the "global warming is mad-made" school of thought?
Who said anything about global warming? Certainly I didn't. In any case, the biases I listed above apply here as well as anywhere else. Predict that global warming is real and man-made, you get funds from those who want to prevent it. Predict that it is fake, and you get funds from those who want to ignore it. As long as it remains a big issue it will get big funding.
To be honest I don't know all the details about how the reserve system works. If a bank wants to use deposits to buy treasury bills, can it leverage the ratio to do so, or does it need to be dollar-for-dollar?
If it can leverage the ratio then mortgages will never go lower than treasuries. If it can't leverage those investments then mortgages only need to have 1/20th the return to be a good investment.
Maybe the issue is just that a lot more people borrow money than save it, even at 20:1.
Well. Not quite. They could only create money without limit to the degree people are willing to borrow from them at rates the banks set. A subtle, but important difference.
What keeps banks from lending money out at 0.1% interest? Basically, opportunity cost due to scarcity. If they lend a dollar to you at 0.1%, then can't lend it to somebody else at 5%. Also, if rates go low enough they could instead invest that money elsewhere, although this probably does not happen much, since banks have limited investment options for deposits, and their supply of strings-free money is much more limited since they can't print that kind of money (up to the limit of the reserve ratio).
However, set the reserve percentage to zero, and all this goes out the window. They can loan person x $1M at 5%, and person y $1M at 0.001%. Their only incentive to raise rates is to cover their costs and maybe to try to avoid self-competition (but with many banks out there, I don't see how this would work without an illegal trust).
The bank doesn't even have to worry about showing a profit. Interest they collect goes into their pockets, losses on loans just get made up for by making more loans, since there is no limit on how much they can loan out. If I loan out $10M and the loan defaults having paid back $5 of principal and $100 of interest, then I come out ahead, since the principal came on the backs of the US currency holder.
Obviously it would never get this out of hand, since the economy would start to melt down well before this point and the Fed would quickly set a finite cap on lending.
The bottom line is that "zero" is a REALLY small number. There is more impact on the economy between interest rates dropping from 0.0001% to 0% than from it dropping from 75% to 5% (though obviously the economy wouldn't work at any of these extremes).
Uh, everybody is beholden to something. Most academic research is government-funding, which means that at the very least it is subject to selection bias.
That isn't to say that academic research shouldn't be trusted - only that there is no such thing as "pure" science except in a philosophy text.
Right. My point was that basically congress gave the Fed the power to set the ratio arbitrarily high, or even to eliminate it altogether (which would give banks the power to essentially print money without limit).
Now, the Fed hasn't done that, but the legislation allows them to.
This is why these jury awards probably won't amount to much.
Ok, for the odd high-profit movie hollywood might actually have to (gasp!) pay out what it was supposed to in the first place. Of course, they get to pay for a 2004 debt in 2010 dollars which are inflated, which in itself probably more than pays for their legal fees.
The way to get them to stop doing this stuff is to assess punitive damages. Cut somebody out of 7%, well, now you're paying them 35%. Cut 5 people out of 7%, well, congratulations, now the film really is a loss - FOR YOU!
If that started happening, then you'd see accounting practices change fast. You can't force a company by merely forcing them to pay with they should have paid in the first place 2% of the time and 10 years late.
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Like licensing, Yucca Mountain is a perfect example of requirements dictated by politics. If you want to make nuclear waste storage impossibly expensive, then smart minds will find a way to make it that way. Government contractors are more than happy to help out with that as well.
There is no reason such an elaborate storage solution is required. Just find reasonably adequate accommodations and lock it all up. If in 10,000 years there is a geologic change, then move it. It is a LOT cheaper to spend a little money now and a little money in 10,000 years than to try to spend a huge fortune today to prevent some issue from happing eons in the future. If you're concerned about the cleanup costs 100k years from now go ahead and deposit a penny in a mutual fund and there won't be any problems. If you put it in T-bills by then your descendants will own the USA.
Mostly due to rediculous standards. They want to store it in a site that won't change on geological timescales. Why not just put the material in containers which make it easy to repackage it from time to time, and which are easy to retransport. In 1000 years if there is an ice age you just ship the collection someplace else.
The retort is "how do you know that civilization won't collapse in 1000 years, eliminating the ability to transport the waste?" I think this is just a bit far-fetched. If that happens then lions and wolves will be a bigger hazard to the average American of 3010 than some radioactive seepage from some abandoned mine.
The thing that drives me nuts is that you aren't entitled to a trial by jury unless you're facing at least six months in prison on a single count. However, in civil trials either party is entitled to a trial by jury if the amount in dispute is over $20. So, you can put somebody in prison for 10 years by charging them with 30 counts with a sentence of 4 months per count and they don't get a jury trial. However, if you break your friend's video game you can drag them in front of a jury to duke it out.
Does that seem just a little out of whack to anybody else? IMHO people should be entitled to a jury trial for any offence whatsoever. By all means have them pay a fee for the jury's time if they are found guilty (loser pays system), but maybe we'd have fewer silly 25mph speed zones if juries had to agree to the fines.
Likewise the state should have to reimburse the accused for lost time when they're found innocent of a crime. These days simply being accused of a crime and having the gall to defend yourself is about all it takes to face financial ruin.
Indeed, it is REALLY stupid police practice as well for a number of reasons.
1. Innocent bystander sees a man pulling a gun and pointing it at somebody who is unarmed (no idea if the gun was aimed or not in this case, but ignore that for this argument). In theory if they have a gun they should be allowed to just shoot the cop, since they aren't identified as such and somebody's life is potentially in imminent danger. Good luck to the poor SOB who tries this, though.
2. An actual law-enforcement agent (cop (on- or off-duty), FBI agent, whatever) witnesses the same thing, and shouts a warning, and then if the unidentified cop flinches the wrong way they get shot. This is EXACTLY how the cops would handle a random person pointing a gun at somebody, and no doubt how this unidentified cop would get handled. Suddenly the thin blue line doesn't help out much.
Out-of-uniform cops are a bad idea most of the time in general, for a lot of reasons. Out-of-uniform cops pointing guns at people is DEFINITELY a bad thing. It is bad for many reasons, the very least of which is that the cop could end up getting shot.
Sorry - make that "extremely similar" - not difficult. Rooting an itouch and rooting an iphone are pretty equivalent from an impact standpoint for all parties involved.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'd think that the presence of the phone exemption would probably be considered by the court if anybody were sued over the itouch. Since the two "infringements" are otherwise extremely difficult it would be difficult for the court to construe that one ought to be legal and the other illegal.
I suspect that Apple wouldn't push something like this to court anyway - the ambiguity is worth a lot more to them than a flat out ruling against them.
Agreed. I'd envision the secure "credit card" of the future having the following mechanism of operation:
1. You interface the card with a computer (via USB, acoustic modem for phone, one-wire, etc).
2. The remote party sends the card a packet with who is to be payed (in the form of a bank certificate), and how much, and whether any kind of recurring transaction is authorized (with details on that if applicable).
3. The card displays the transaction info on a display built into the card.
4. The user approves the transaction by hitting an approve button and typing in a PIN using a keypad on the card.
5. The card generates a certificate and sends it back to the remote party.
6. The remote party confirms successful receipt of the certificate to the card.
The remote party and the card communicate by SSL (using bank-signed certificates), so no MITM, although the algorithm should be fairly invulnerable to MITM anyway.
If there is a transmission error the remote party just asks for a retransmission any time until step 6. The card and the bank would both spot likely duplications. You couldn't spoof the merchant name (Gooogle Innc) or anything like that since it comes via a bank certificate. Nothing is trusted outside the card itself, so no risk of trojans/etc.
All it needs is a credit card with a battery, display, keypad, and small CPU optimized for crypto. I can't imagine that these are more expensive to produce than the cost of bank fraud.
You could even have cards that function as digital wallets, handling multiple banks, government IDs, etc. All it takes are some standards, and the right CAs for the right data items.
Agreed. In fact, as long as the big company has no liability it just turns into one big race for the bottom.
Suppose you run a reputable oil-rig operations company. You'd like to have people outsource their rigs to you. You believe in safety and the environment, so you take all kinds of steps to avoid something like the BP disaster. What happens? Well, you go out of business. You have to compete against other companies that cut corners. Companies like BP don't care about the safety of your workers or the environment, since that is on you. Your competitors charge less, and that is all they care about. Sure, it isn't sustainable, but most small companies aren't sustainable. The company running the rig can pay out dividends while the money is there, and then fold when the lawsuits hit. Indeed, if you didn't run a disreputable company your shareholders would probably fire you (low dividends compared to peers) and replace you with somebody who would mismanage it.
In other industries there is a clear assignment of responsibility, which cannot be outsourced. You can hire somebody else to do the work, but not to assume the liability. If Bayer sells a bottle of tainted aspirin, then they're liable even if they bought bad pills from a supplier. The only thing they're not liable for is what happens to the package after they sell it to the warehouse/store, although they are required to put the pills in tamper-evident packaging.
Indeed, in many industries liability is personal. That's why certified engineers have to sign off on bridges - they are personally responsible for the design (but not necessarily the implementation). I think the EU does something similar for drugs.
I don't have a big problem with government-subsidized communications infrastructure (broadband, TV, mail, roads, etc). I think it is a stretch to call that a subsidized press. The difference is that content isn't being looked at when you subsidize the mail.
Sure, by making mail cheap you can mail magazines with scandalous articles more easily, but you can also mail catalogs or letters cheaply too. If only some people can get the subsidy, then now you open the door to censorship.
Now, paying the reporters directly really seems like a bad idea if you want real oversight.
You don't keep kicking him for three minutes just like you don't pull out a gun and start shooting him once he's already down.
So, the reason cops aren't supposed to shoot people when they're down is because their only purpose is to stop and detain somebody, and then the justice system takes over. The punishment is inflicted by making them spend years of their life behind bars, or whatever is appropriate.
However, in this case there would be no punishment. That bully would be free to resume his bullying once he was able to stand up again. Teachers would separate them, and then the victim has to hope that the bully gives up and doesn't try to ambush him sometime.
So, the solution was to ensure that the attack was punitive in nature, and not merely a gesture. Now, clearly that doesn't need to involve nearly killing somebody, but frankly to be effective it probably has to be a pretty solid beating - enough to require hospitalization. I can't see a typical bully responding to any less. If the guy had a free pass then it is in his interest to make the most of it.
Do I think that victims should be beating up bullies? Of course not - schools should be reigning them in and punishing them severely enough to act as an effective deterrent. Maybe that is just scaring them in front of a judge, or threatening their parents with a $25k fine, or maybe sending the 13-year-old-terror into incarceration for six months. I don't know what it takes, but the least punishment likely to be effective should be employed.
The alternative is that some kids go on to be bullied, suffering psychological damage. Maybe they hold it in, end up hating people, and then become psychopathic CEOs determined to make a buck at any cost without any regard for society (the society that showed no regard for them). Maybe they get over it. Maybe they lash out and beat the tar out of the bully. Or, perhaps they come into school with weapons and kill a few dozen of the children and teachers who sat by and did nothing. Most of these outcomes are completely unacceptable, and the only one that is tolerable is far from ideal.
The bottom line is that you can't just look the other way when somebody treats others like crap. Sooner or later you get to deal with the consequences, and it may not be pretty.
Agreed, although with legal costs being what they are I think loser-pays does need one adjustment.
When the compliant gets filed in court, before anybody spends a dime doing anything (besides filing the complaint itself), the court should determine what the reasonable attorney fees are for the case. Each side can then spend only that much, and is only liable for that much. Otherwise you again end up with an arms race where everybody wants to outspend the other, or be on the hook for huge legal bills the other party unnecessarily incurred.
I think a good way to look at it is that the RIAA is essentially at war.
War isn't about return-on-investment. If anything it is about the opposite.
I want you to do something. You don't want to do it. I show that I'm willing to spend $10M ruining somebody else's life with no real gain to myself because they refused to do what I want you to do. Then I ask again if you're sure you don't want to do it.
When the real Mafia blows up somebody's store, they aren't doing it to gain revenue from that store (face it, that store won't have any more revenue). They do it to continue to collect revenue from every other store on that block.
The success or failure of the RIAA's actions isn't measured by how much they collect from the people they sue. It is measured by how much they collect from the people they don't sue.
Hey - I don't like any of this either, but the people running the show at the RIAA know exactly what they're doing.
Of course, in the litigious US, the Trolley Problem has a very straightforward optimal solution - run and hope nobody got a photo of you. It wouldn't surprise me if you could get sued for taking either course of action.
From a purely utilitarian point of view, executing anybody who is likely to consume more than they produce over the remainder of their life is a net-positive for society. That is almost exactly the definition of fascism.
I'm sorry, if some guy goes out and kills somebody, I can't do anything about that but try to catch him. However, if I support a law that lets my government kill innocent people as long as it is likely that they'll have a net savings of life then I'm the one with blood on my hands.
I'm not even really a big opponent of the death penalty. However, clearly it can't be applied in a utilitarian way.
Great, then the local town can levy a tax and finish it. Nobody has a problem with the town building a bridge to nowhere. The problem is that when you ask others to pay for it...
Yeah, well, MB and GB are generally deprecated as well, at least in the way that most here like to use them. Good luck with your karma if you bring that up, though!
Well, how many people have $10k in the bank, and a $250k mortgage, a $15k car loan, and $20k on their credit cards? They each have almost a 30:1 ratio, so for each person like that you need several people with a more modest 10:1 ratio.
The average american is WAY in debt. That means that even at 20:1 there is plenty of demand for loans to go around.
Everybody agrees on that - what they can't agree on is which particular large percentage is the one getting it wrong... :)
There it is, the same bullshit meme that gets trotted out by every special interest whose agenda might be derailed by the truth.
Ok, we disagree, so I must be a "special interest." As if anybody on the planet is motivated solely by the benefit of all of humanity with no regard to personal well-being.
The fact of the matter is that there is no bias in research whose funding does not depend on a particular result or conclusion, e.g. the vast majority of academic research.
Uh, explain academic misconduct then? I'm sure that for every case that is uncovered a million get missed. Even Gregor Mendel is suspected of cooking his results. That basically results in confirmation bias. When it comes to public funding, results that suggest that a problem exists are more likely to lead to funding than results that suggest that a problem does not exist. If you conclude that asteroid 123X definitely won't hit earth, chances are you won't get funded to continue observing 123X, but if you're the foremost expert on 123X or own the best telescope for observing it, then it certainly wouldn't hurt your budget if the results suggested that 123X might be at risk of impacting Washington DC.
Oil companies, big pharma, etc., anyone with enough cash to buy control of the funding process, and the truth gets thrown under the bus.
Well, for the most part I suspect that most studies with biased funding probably tend to be honest with regard to the results they actually publish - that is they don't just make up results. The problem is with negative results. If a special interest funds 50 studies, and half confirm a result, and half contradict it, you'll end up with 25 studies with the desired outcome in the literature. However, academic research can be vulnerable to the same kinds of influences.
So..., what well-funded group is paying for the "global warming is mad-made" school of thought?
Who said anything about global warming? Certainly I didn't. In any case, the biases I listed above apply here as well as anywhere else. Predict that global warming is real and man-made, you get funds from those who want to prevent it. Predict that it is fake, and you get funds from those who want to ignore it. As long as it remains a big issue it will get big funding.
Yup. Indeed, I'd prefer that the dominant ad platform for my phone be something that is built-in to the firmware.
Just makes it that much easier to turn them all off with one well-placed pair of slashes.
To be honest I don't know all the details about how the reserve system works. If a bank wants to use deposits to buy treasury bills, can it leverage the ratio to do so, or does it need to be dollar-for-dollar?
If it can leverage the ratio then mortgages will never go lower than treasuries. If it can't leverage those investments then mortgages only need to have 1/20th the return to be a good investment.
Maybe the issue is just that a lot more people borrow money than save it, even at 20:1.
Well. Not quite. They could only create money without limit to the degree people are willing to borrow from them at rates the banks set. A subtle, but important difference.
What keeps banks from lending money out at 0.1% interest? Basically, opportunity cost due to scarcity. If they lend a dollar to you at 0.1%, then can't lend it to somebody else at 5%. Also, if rates go low enough they could instead invest that money elsewhere, although this probably does not happen much, since banks have limited investment options for deposits, and their supply of strings-free money is much more limited since they can't print that kind of money (up to the limit of the reserve ratio).
However, set the reserve percentage to zero, and all this goes out the window. They can loan person x $1M at 5%, and person y $1M at 0.001%. Their only incentive to raise rates is to cover their costs and maybe to try to avoid self-competition (but with many banks out there, I don't see how this would work without an illegal trust).
The bank doesn't even have to worry about showing a profit. Interest they collect goes into their pockets, losses on loans just get made up for by making more loans, since there is no limit on how much they can loan out. If I loan out $10M and the loan defaults having paid back $5 of principal and $100 of interest, then I come out ahead, since the principal came on the backs of the US currency holder.
Obviously it would never get this out of hand, since the economy would start to melt down well before this point and the Fed would quickly set a finite cap on lending.
The bottom line is that "zero" is a REALLY small number. There is more impact on the economy between interest rates dropping from 0.0001% to 0% than from it dropping from 75% to 5% (though obviously the economy wouldn't work at any of these extremes).
Uh, everybody is beholden to something. Most academic research is government-funding, which means that at the very least it is subject to selection bias.
That isn't to say that academic research shouldn't be trusted - only that there is no such thing as "pure" science except in a philosophy text.
Right. My point was that basically congress gave the Fed the power to set the ratio arbitrarily high, or even to eliminate it altogether (which would give banks the power to essentially print money without limit).
Now, the Fed hasn't done that, but the legislation allows them to.
This is why these jury awards probably won't amount to much.
Ok, for the odd high-profit movie hollywood might actually have to (gasp!) pay out what it was supposed to in the first place. Of course, they get to pay for a 2004 debt in 2010 dollars which are inflated, which in itself probably more than pays for their legal fees.
The way to get them to stop doing this stuff is to assess punitive damages. Cut somebody out of 7%, well, now you're paying them 35%. Cut 5 people out of 7%, well, congratulations, now the film really is a loss - FOR YOU!
If that started happening, then you'd see accounting practices change fast. You can't force a company by merely forcing them to pay with they should have paid in the first place 2% of the time and 10 years late.