Seriously. The "or just print it" part clinched the dumbass award for him.
Are you under the impression that that's not what they do now? What do you think the federal debt is? It's money printing. Or the Fed can just print it itself like they did after 2008. If it makes you feel better, they can go through the formality of creating Treasury bills to offset the dollars they just created.
Twitter as a technology company was an afterthought as the founders squabble over who would be CEO, spent investors' money out the wazoo and didn't bother finding a way to make money.
And let me guess: They're all billionaires anyway.
Are you using the "They did it so why cant I?" excuse?? I thought we were all adults here.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that we are all adults here. I'm not using the "They did it so why can't I?" excuse. I hate that mode of argument because it defends behavior relative to that of others rather than on the result of the behavior itself. In fact, I pointed out that the investigation into Russia's interference, if any, is ongoing. Therefore we cannot conclude that there is or was nothing going on, or that "reality [has] already interjected" as the GP asserts. I then jeeringly pointed out that the political side that most wants this Russia business to go away had no problem commencing investigation after investigation into something they really wanted to be true, even though they came up empty every time.
On the one hand these guys (Republicans and those on the political right) want to disbelieve the idea that Russia interfered in the election without any investigation, and yet also refused to give up repeated investigations into something that actually didn't happen (Hillary being at fault for what happened at the American Consulate in Libya). It's almost as if they have an agenda and don't want any facts getting in the way.
No, I'm thinking more like Mosaddegh in Iran and a host of Central and South American countries that had their democratically elected governments overthrown because they weren't playing nice with big western companies. Can't have local people making their own decisions, no siree! They might start thinking crazy things like their natural resources are there to benefit the population rather than be exploited by multinational corporations.
When Capitalism doesn't get its way, Capitalism sends in the CIA. Ask John Perkins about it sometime.
Oh dear, this is slashdot, you cant go telling people the truth here dude.
They dont want to know, they still praying for the Russian thing to be true despite reality having already interjected.
Oh, has the investigation been completed? No? Then how do you know? Or do you think it will be like when the Republicans investigated Hillary Clinton about Benghazi! over and over again, finding nothing but continuing to fuck that chicken anyway? Yeah, maybe it'll be like that.
That's a silly ad hominem attack. Ayn Rand's views are rational and nuanced, she understood and described the collectivist ideology to such a fine degree that it makes it impossible for them to attack her ideas, they can only attack her personally.
Ayn Rand had a thing for powerful men and a half-baked philosophy to go with it. She was completely blind to the fact that wealthy people can and do act myopically and irresponsibly. To her they were all industrial supermen. One of her students, Alan Greenspan, put it well, "I made a mistake in presuming that the self interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders" Self-interest, and the greed it excuses, led us to the brink of economic collapse. Greenspan acknowledged the flaw in his ideology; Rand's ideology.
The minimum wage in the UK is less than £15,000, to keep one prisoner locked up for a year is £65,0000. We'd end up spending more money trying to keep them incarcerated instead of trying to help them get clean. If you take that £45,000 per year and put it into a rehabilitation program there is a chance that next year, you wont have to pay that extra amount. Incarceration for minor crimes increases recidivism.
Sure but we get to feel superior by judging people and then punishing them. Can you really put a price on that?
They don't want to change or they don't think they can. Liberals will happily enable them and tell them they can't.
UBI is not going to solve the urban crime problem. Those people already represent some degree of ambition and consumerist hunger. They want more than their mere pittance and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
Hey look, someone else who thinks poor people are poor because they just don't want to work! As if there are all these unfilled, good paying jobs, but so many people would rather live in squalor. But hey, at least you can feel superior and absolve yourself of any sympathy by judging them and assuming you know fuck all about their lives.
I also love how you confuse desperate choices borne from a lack of legitimate options with "ambition and consumerist hunger". You seem to understand on some level that these people are turning to a life of crime, which is dangerous and will probably end with them dead or in jail, because they have no other options between that and a mere pittance. Yet you can still think that poor people are poor because they're lazy and make bad choices. It's the definition of doublethink.
There is no greater fallacy today than the belief the government must tax what it spends. All money is created by a ruling sovereignty. There is a reason the Secret Service is one of the oldest institutions around - counterfeiting is a direct attack on sovereignty.
Taxes are about inducing demand for state currency, and in modern economies, controlling for the inflation that comes from a government regulated banking system. You'll know the income tax was legalized within months of passing the Federal Reserve Act. Now you know why.
What a load of hogwash.
Except for recent actions like "quantitative easing" and other pump/dump strategies, way less than half of the "money" is created by sovereignty. It is created by the banks (and other financial institutions). Part of it is regulated by fraction reserve lending, the other part is the wild west (e.g., credit default swaps). The government tries to monopolize this by creating some demand by "taxation", but that only affects a portion of the "money" that gets exchanged (because many transactions are shielded from taxation).
For example, just the other day, Apple created $7B out of thin air by issuing bonds backed by money in Ireland out of the reach or purview of the Fed. The global Credit Default Swap market is estimated at around $500 trillion. Compared to the federal reserve about about $1.6 trillion actual deposits times the reserve ratio of 10% would only be a fraction of only the CDS market, not even including the corporate bond market and other financial derivative markets.
The cart is now driving the horse for better or worse...
In modern times, if the govt were to simply try print money to increase its budget, it probably couldn't print it fast enough to outpace inflation (as many countries that have tried have found out the hard way).
It's not hogwash. Taxes create a demand for currency. That's not important now that the Federal Reserve Note is a standard and accepted currency. But back when it was introduced they needed a way to ensure a demand for the new currency. Taxation in dollars fills that need.
You are correct that most dollars are created through fractional reserve lending. But that doesn't address the fact that the US government can and does spend without taxing. Yes, it adds to the "debt". But you know as well as I do that it doesn't matter. There will always be debt, because every dollar represents debt. It's just a matter of who is holding it. The US government cannot just print money with abandon, as you point out. But as long as the money supply doesn't grow faster than the overall economy, the Fed can print money for the government to spend.
The point of capitalism is to create a bigger middle class, not a bigger sponge class. Someone has to pay the bills.The fat cats have armies of lobbyists and lawyers to avoid taxes. That effectively leaves the rest of us.
If you are fixated on the minimum wage, your economic policy is a failure.
The point of Capitalism is to make money for the capitalists. The fact that they accumulate wealth for themselves, keeping it out of the hands of others, and then, as you point out, spend some of it to avoid giving much of it back to the society that enabled their hoarding makes me wonder who the actual sponges are.
Speech based computing is Star Trek level amazing, and you're upset that it could theoretically be used for spying. Meanwhile, you are typing this on a computer that has a microphone, you have a cell phone with a microphone, you have a tablet with a microphone, your TV has a microphone.
Not yet, it's not. I have found speech-controlled systems to be clunky and of limited use. When I can talk to a computer like I can talk to a person, the technology will have arrived. For now it's still a novelty and a toy.
I'll also throw in a random, wayward bonus argument: Alexa will save hundreds of thousands of lives over the next few decades. How? By being part of a new generation of cloud-based voice recognition that will eventually replace texting and driving.
Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are very rapidly evolving machine understanding of human speech, and ubiquity among car infotainment systems could very well save drivers...
That may end up happening. But the tech will have to get much better before it does. I'm not sure if you have used Siri over a car interface, but I have found it to be quite distracting. It often takes multiple tries to get a text right, during which time the cognitive load is palpable.
A government can only rule with the consent of the governed.
What? You think brutal dictators have the consent of the governed? You don't need consent when people are cowed by fear.
If you don't like having to feed your own power to the grid then don't do it. I thought that was the point of the article, that the utilities lose their power over people because technology has flattened that economics of scale curve. If enough people produce enough electricity that they utility is effectively doing nothing but collecting a fee for the grid tie, that no one uses, then the utility can do nothing if enough people stop paying the fees.
Did you read the part where the poster said it is illegal to not feed your power back into the grid? Just don't do it? Gosh, why didn't he think of that? It's not like the authorities have a means of compelling compliance with the law, or anything.
Perhaps you can explain what I'm missing here?
You are missing that governments can rule by force, without the broad people's consent, and that when something is made illegal, doing it anyway can bring on harsh consequences.
Minimum wage jobs are for teenagers living with their parents.
Or for adults that didn't give a shit when they were in school, dropped out or whatever. Fuck em. Let them live the life they formulated for themselves. I'm god damned tired of Progressives trying to make everyone have the same outcome in life no matter what level of fuck ups they've become.
Right, because people should pay of their mistakes for the rest of their lives. We all have full knowledge of the consequences of our actions, and what our future holds. No one's judgement is ever clouded by anger or frustration. So there is no excuse for not getting things right the first time.
Compared to, forced to work in a labor camp or sent off to a gulag because you said "my back hurs"t? Quite the choices we have
Indeed! Is it impossible to come up with an economic system that actually benefits the majority of a population? Are our only choices oppressive Communism and exploitative Capitalism? It seems both systems primarily benefit a chosen few.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. The "or just print it" part clinched the dumbass award for him.
Are you under the impression that that's not what they do now? What do you think the federal debt is? It's money printing. Or the Fed can just print it itself like they did after 2008. If it makes you feel better, they can go through the formality of creating Treasury bills to offset the dollars they just created.
Sure it does...
Now how much income?
Double the poverty line.
I believe this is a rare opportunity to use the original meaning of the phrase "begs the question".
What question? The poverty line? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Twitter as a technology company was an afterthought as the founders squabble over who would be CEO, spent investors' money out the wazoo and didn't bother finding a way to make money.
And let me guess: They're all billionaires anyway.
The correct answer is that it's a trick question. You need A, C & D at least.
Although, if I had to pick only one, it's C. With enough capital, you can afford to buy the rest.
Hell, with enough capital you can prop the thing up long enough to take it public, then dump it on the market and walk away with millions.
At Least $1.48 Billion in VC Funding Has Gone Up in Smoke This Year...
And that's just Uber! ;-)
It is the liberals long awaited Panopticon.
LOL, you think only liberals want a panopticon?
Lots of women falsely think being aggressive and/or violent is "manly".
That describes our culture in general, if you hadn't noticed.
Sure it does...
Now how much income?
Double the poverty line.
How do we account for inflation?
Peg an increase to the inflation rate; similar to what we do with Social Security
Who gets to answer those questions?
Congress does.
Is there any accommodation for unequal needs?
No, it's universal
What qualifies as "universal"? Does it apply to all citizens?
Yes, every man, woman and child above a certain age
Does it apply to all residents?
Maybe
Do convicted felons still get the paycheck while in prison?
Perhaps they would get a portion, considering their room and board are already being paid for by the state
How do we stop fraud?
It's universal, so there would not be much fraud. But you could tie it to the Social Security system and track it that way.
Where does the money come from?
The federal government. They could tax for it, or just print it.
Is that fair and just?
Yes.
Hey, check it out, I just worked out a basic income! ;-)
Are you using the "They did it so why cant I?" excuse?? I thought we were all adults here.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that we are all adults here. I'm not using the "They did it so why can't I?" excuse. I hate that mode of argument because it defends behavior relative to that of others rather than on the result of the behavior itself. In fact, I pointed out that the investigation into Russia's interference, if any, is ongoing. Therefore we cannot conclude that there is or was nothing going on, or that "reality [has] already interjected" as the GP asserts. I then jeeringly pointed out that the political side that most wants this Russia business to go away had no problem commencing investigation after investigation into something they really wanted to be true, even though they came up empty every time.
On the one hand these guys (Republicans and those on the political right) want to disbelieve the idea that Russia interfered in the election without any investigation, and yet also refused to give up repeated investigations into something that actually didn't happen (Hillary being at fault for what happened at the American Consulate in Libya). It's almost as if they have an agenda and don't want any facts getting in the way.
You mean like in Cuba, Venezuela, Russia? Ferret
No, I'm thinking more like Mosaddegh in Iran and a host of Central and South American countries that had their democratically elected governments overthrown because they weren't playing nice with big western companies. Can't have local people making their own decisions, no siree! They might start thinking crazy things like their natural resources are there to benefit the population rather than be exploited by multinational corporations.
When Capitalism doesn't get its way, Capitalism sends in the CIA. Ask John Perkins about it sometime.
Oh dear, this is slashdot, you cant go telling people the truth here dude.
They dont want to know, they still praying for the Russian thing to be true despite reality having already interjected.
Oh, has the investigation been completed? No? Then how do you know? Or do you think it will be like when the Republicans investigated Hillary Clinton about Benghazi! over and over again, finding nothing but continuing to fuck that chicken anyway? Yeah, maybe it'll be like that.
One group working hard while another gets something for nothing results in greater divisiveness and resentment, particularly when times are tough.
This is true. Once all the workers, who actually do the producing, realize how much the owners are skimming off the top, there could be hell to pay.
That's a silly ad hominem attack. Ayn Rand's views are rational and nuanced, she understood and described the collectivist ideology to such a fine degree that it makes it impossible for them to attack her ideas, they can only attack her personally.
Ayn Rand had a thing for powerful men and a half-baked philosophy to go with it. She was completely blind to the fact that wealthy people can and do act myopically and irresponsibly. To her they were all industrial supermen. One of her students, Alan Greenspan, put it well, "I made a mistake in presuming that the self interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders" Self-interest, and the greed it excuses, led us to the brink of economic collapse. Greenspan acknowledged the flaw in his ideology; Rand's ideology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkLDdQ3HORo
The minimum wage in the UK is less than £15,000, to keep one prisoner locked up for a year is £65,0000. We'd end up spending more money trying to keep them incarcerated instead of trying to help them get clean. If you take that £45,000 per year and put it into a rehabilitation program there is a chance that next year, you wont have to pay that extra amount. Incarceration for minor crimes increases recidivism.
Sure but we get to feel superior by judging people and then punishing them. Can you really put a price on that?
I can't support a UBI because of all of the force and violence it would require to implement.
But you probably like Capitalism, with all the force and violence it requires.
> People in poverty:
Don't care.
They don't want to change or they don't think they can. Liberals will happily enable them and tell them they can't.
UBI is not going to solve the urban crime problem. Those people already represent some degree of ambition and consumerist hunger. They want more than their mere pittance and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
Hey look, someone else who thinks poor people are poor because they just don't want to work! As if there are all these unfilled, good paying jobs, but so many people would rather live in squalor. But hey, at least you can feel superior and absolve yourself of any sympathy by judging them and assuming you know fuck all about their lives.
I also love how you confuse desperate choices borne from a lack of legitimate options with "ambition and consumerist hunger". You seem to understand on some level that these people are turning to a life of crime, which is dangerous and will probably end with them dead or in jail, because they have no other options between that and a mere pittance. Yet you can still think that poor people are poor because they're lazy and make bad choices. It's the definition of doublethink.
There is no greater fallacy today than the belief the government must tax what it spends. All money is created by a ruling sovereignty. There is a reason the Secret Service is one of the oldest institutions around - counterfeiting is a direct attack on sovereignty.
Taxes are about inducing demand for state currency, and in modern economies, controlling for the inflation that comes from a government regulated banking system. You'll know the income tax was legalized within months of passing the Federal Reserve Act. Now you know why.
What a load of hogwash.
Except for recent actions like "quantitative easing" and other pump/dump strategies, way less than half of the "money" is created by sovereignty. It is created by the banks (and other financial institutions). Part of it is regulated by fraction reserve lending, the other part is the wild west (e.g., credit default swaps). The government tries to monopolize this by creating some demand by "taxation", but that only affects a portion of the "money" that gets exchanged (because many transactions are shielded from taxation).
For example, just the other day, Apple created $7B out of thin air by issuing bonds backed by money in Ireland out of the reach or purview of the Fed. The global Credit Default Swap market is estimated at around $500 trillion. Compared to the federal reserve about about $1.6 trillion actual deposits times the reserve ratio of 10% would only be a fraction of only the CDS market, not even including the corporate bond market and other financial derivative markets.
The cart is now driving the horse for better or worse...
In modern times, if the govt were to simply try print money to increase its budget, it probably couldn't print it fast enough to outpace inflation (as many countries that have tried have found out the hard way).
It's not hogwash. Taxes create a demand for currency. That's not important now that the Federal Reserve Note is a standard and accepted currency. But back when it was introduced they needed a way to ensure a demand for the new currency. Taxation in dollars fills that need.
You are correct that most dollars are created through fractional reserve lending. But that doesn't address the fact that the US government can and does spend without taxing. Yes, it adds to the "debt". But you know as well as I do that it doesn't matter. There will always be debt, because every dollar represents debt. It's just a matter of who is holding it. The US government cannot just print money with abandon, as you point out. But as long as the money supply doesn't grow faster than the overall economy, the Fed can print money for the government to spend.
The point of capitalism is to create a bigger middle class, not a bigger sponge class. Someone has to pay the bills.The fat cats have armies of lobbyists and lawyers to avoid taxes. That effectively leaves the rest of us.
If you are fixated on the minimum wage, your economic policy is a failure.
The point of Capitalism is to make money for the capitalists. The fact that they accumulate wealth for themselves, keeping it out of the hands of others, and then, as you point out, spend some of it to avoid giving much of it back to the society that enabled their hoarding makes me wonder who the actual sponges are.
Speech based computing is Star Trek level amazing, and you're upset that it could theoretically be used for spying. Meanwhile, you are typing this on a computer that has a microphone, you have a cell phone with a microphone, you have a tablet with a microphone, your TV has a microphone.
Not yet, it's not. I have found speech-controlled systems to be clunky and of limited use. When I can talk to a computer like I can talk to a person, the technology will have arrived. For now it's still a novelty and a toy.
I'll also throw in a random, wayward bonus argument: Alexa will save hundreds of thousands of lives over the next few decades. How? By being part of a new generation of cloud-based voice recognition that will eventually replace texting and driving.
Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are very rapidly evolving machine understanding of human speech, and ubiquity among car infotainment systems could very well save drivers...
That may end up happening. But the tech will have to get much better before it does. I'm not sure if you have used Siri over a car interface, but I have found it to be quite distracting. It often takes multiple tries to get a text right, during which time the cognitive load is palpable.
A government can only rule with the consent of the governed.
What? You think brutal dictators have the consent of the governed? You don't need consent when people are cowed by fear.
If you don't like having to feed your own power to the grid then don't do it. I thought that was the point of the article, that the utilities lose their power over people because technology has flattened that economics of scale curve. If enough people produce enough electricity that they utility is effectively doing nothing but collecting a fee for the grid tie, that no one uses, then the utility can do nothing if enough people stop paying the fees.
Did you read the part where the poster said it is illegal to not feed your power back into the grid? Just don't do it? Gosh, why didn't he think of that? It's not like the authorities have a means of compelling compliance with the law, or anything.
Perhaps you can explain what I'm missing here?
You are missing that governments can rule by force, without the broad people's consent, and that when something is made illegal, doing it anyway can bring on harsh consequences.
Working hard and playing by the rules has never been a recipe for anything but modest success at best
Yet this is the delusion under which a large number of Americans labor, and the ruling class perpetuates.
Minimum wage jobs are for teenagers living with their parents.
Or for adults that didn't give a shit when they were in school, dropped out or whatever. Fuck em. Let them live the life they formulated for themselves. I'm god damned tired of Progressives trying to make everyone have the same outcome in life no matter what level of fuck ups they've become.
Right, because people should pay of their mistakes for the rest of their lives. We all have full knowledge of the consequences of our actions, and what our future holds. No one's judgement is ever clouded by anger or frustration. So there is no excuse for not getting things right the first time.
Compared to, forced to work in a labor camp or sent off to a gulag because you said "my back hurs"t? Quite the choices we have
Indeed! Is it impossible to come up with an economic system that actually benefits the majority of a population? Are our only choices oppressive Communism and exploitative Capitalism? It seems both systems primarily benefit a chosen few.
Meh, lots of people, including the United States, are constantly blowing people up.