This article explains why QE isn't printing money.
That's a flawed premise. And the accounting analysis in that article is terrible. For example, we have this gem:
Bank ABC has only shuffled the composition of its portfolio around. It's exchanged bonds for reserves in what is no more than an asset swap. There is no increase in the size of its balance sheet.
Except that bank ABC swapped risky bonds (the article deceptively labels this "T-bonds" in the chart) for risk-free reserves. And there's another possibility here, that the bank issues risky bonds which are then purchased by the Fed. Low interest loans which can be used to deceptively prop up the balance sheet for a bank or a bankrupt auto company.
Then we go to the Central Bank's accounting sheet. The author claims that the amount of assets accumulated are balanced by "reserve", a liability. But reserve has no meaning for a central bank. There is no obligation attached to having a high or low reserve. This is where the Federal Reserve prints money by having a high reserve.
One of the huge problems with the US government's GM dealings is that we don't actually know how much they put into GM. Last I checked there was somewhere over two trillion dollars in US bonds owned by the Federal Reserve and they're still printing money this way. That's a lot of debt, including private bonds and an easy, unaccountable way to hide losses.
If this were a private business doing this, we'd be outraged because who knows how many bad deals and losses are being hidden via QE money?
As the summary points out, the bailout prevented the loss of ~1M jobs and 0.6M people losing their pensions.
No. Even in a chapter 7 bankruptcy the job loss would have been less than that. And how many jobs were never created because the US government interfered? We'll never know. The political metric is "jobs created or saved" not "jobs lost or never created in the first place".
Furthermore you seem to be forgetting that in 2008 there was ZERO capital available. Nobody could get capital from the banks because there was no liquidity to be had.
And if GM was a competently run business they wouldn't have needed capital so badly in 2008.
Even if we could have magically waived a wand and provided the capital the engineering would take years. It takes many years to even build a very small auto company like Tesla.
So why is it relevant that some things take a while to do? Does that mean that no one should start a winery or olive orchard because those things take time?
A collapse of GM would not magically create a bunch of small startups to fill the void. It would mostly just redistribute among the big players.
Actually, the collapse of GM, which is something that's been going on since the 1970s, has grown a lot of rival automobile businesses in the US. They're just owned by foreign companies like Toyota or Mercedes.
I don't know that completing the collapse of GM would create a bunch of start ups, but I do know that bailing GM out won't do that.
Look up the area of arable land per person today and contemplate population growth.
You might want to do that as well. It's worth noting that a lot of rain actually does fall on land (the whole "most of the Earth is water" argument is a huge non sequitur), arable land is relative, and population growth is already controlled in the developed world.
A spherical shell Dyson with a radius of a million kilometers (about the distance at which tungsten can melt) would be about a quadrillion hectares. At 1 kg per square meter (for solar cells and support infrastructure), that turns out to be roughly 10^16 kg of mass which is roughly a ten millionth of the mass of Mercury.
Let alone what would be required to keep that material stably orbiting?
Note that every single component would be a light sail and hence, inherently maneuverable. Similarly, one could deorbit debris via lasers or reflected sunlight.
It has to be worthwhile to do - there has to be a payoff.
You would be harvesting a significant fraction of the radiated energy of a star. That could be used for producing high energy things like processing large volumes of matter or creating large amounts of anti-matter. It could be used to beam power over dozens of light years or propel light sail vehicles to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
I'll just note that we already have a significant step towards Dyson spheres with satellites that are solar powered. From there, there are a few technological hurdles such as a solar power system able to withstand being fairly close to the Sun as well as as the previously mentioned traffic and debris control. There's also some major economic hurdles such as a manufacturing base capable of turning a significant amount of mass into these satellites over a reasonable period of time.
But one doesn't have to break laws of physics, or even develop much in the way of technology past what we have today. It's also an incremental process which doesn't require you to fully embrace or fully complete the strategy in order to obtain benefit from the resulting infrastructure.
My view is that you can trace a clear path from today's technology to something like this. It's extraordinarily ambitious, much like terraforming one of the planets. But it has the feature that it can be detected from far away since one effect is to create a larger lower temperature halo around the star (or even completely obscuring the star altogether).
it's just not possible to build the kind of things you'd see at stellar distances.
Actually, it is. Dyson spheres for example are such a case. One doesn't build them out of a single shell, but rather out of a cloud of satellites. So the hard engineering requirements are that you build a lot of satellites and that you figure out traffic control. Neither is physically impossible.
That structure would be visible to anyone with our level of technology (eg, the Hubble Space Telescope) in our galaxy who has line of sight.
Also there's the matter of local structures. Why aren't there obvious buildings or other structures on Earth or nearby (say on the Moon) from extraterrestrials?
The blackouts were intentionally induced by Enron executives in order to make more money.
They were also intentionally induced by California state officials (who could have stopped the crisis at any time through a variety of means) though motive is a bit uncertain. I'm leaning towards bribes from Enron and related businesses.
It would have taken a lot of Lunokhod missions true, but most likely it would have been at a much lower cost.
Than a national prestige mission that happened to have some scientific output as part of the package? A manned exploration program that put some effort into reducing costs would also have been much lower cost than Apollo.
although it is renewable, once you exceed the capacity for the natural system to renew it, you may as well be mining it
I already noted we're not exceeding the capacity of rain. We're not even within a few orders of magnitude of doing so. And why "mine" it when you still need to transport the water to where it'll be used? It's just as hard a transport problem for most of the world as would be transporting fresh rainwater from where it falls to where it is needed.
They were saying similar things about Japan in the 1970s and creating chicken little blockbusters in the 1980s about how Japan was taking over the US. Now, Japan is merely a really big economy without either the ridicule or terror.
Here's the cold, hard facts: For every one of you who win that fucking friend lottery, there are thousands of people who don't.
That sort of observation is only relevant when a) it's actually a "fact", and b) a different bunch of "thousands of people" for each person who won the "friend lottery".
An actual survey found that more than half of all jobs offered were filled internally or by referral. That indicates to me that a lot of people, not merely one in a few thousand, found jobs via the "friend lobby".
I personally, have picked up at least three jobs via the "friend lottery". I don't think I'm even remotely unusual in that.
Too bad the US leaned back on the "we're #1, why try harder" position. Just think where we could be by now.
At some point, they needed to have something in space which generated a return on investment. Apollo didn't do that. And the Shuttle ended up being even worse (for about ten years till 1984, no one in the US could actually launch a payload on a private launch vehicle).
Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price.
It didn't. The scientific output of Apollo was quite remarkable. And there's two simple reasons why. First, they had the best machines of the day, people (which incidentally are still the best machines of the day) gathering samples and running experiments on the surface.
And second, they returned 380 kg of lunar material to be studied for the past few decades. Do you really think a 60s vintage lunar rover is going to get better data on lunar material on location than generations of Earth-based scientists do with a sample return?
All money spent in manned space exploration will pay dividends ultimately, at least a trillion fold.
I have no idea whether you're serious or not. But I'll point out that there are substantial opportunity costs when one burns a few billion on a white elephant rather than something productive.
Before we try and get and that additional freshwater - has anyone found another possible _deposit_ location for all the rubbish and toxic waste we're producing?
Well, there is the ground. That's where we put most of our rubbish and toxic waste. It works pretty well despite the complaints to the contrary.
But if there is a 100 years worth of more energy - why even _try_ and save? Why not even indulge in even more energy-intensive enterprises?
Because the cost is greater than the benefit. Sometimes it actually is worth conserving cheap energy.
The same goes for finding huge amounts of new fresh-water - we'll just find ways to consume it even faster, instead of trying to focus on limiting the damage we do to the planet, and treating any additional resources as 'emergency rations' that we won't touch unless there is no other way.
What's the point of this "focus"? The planet isn't that damaged. The resources in question aren't that depleted.
But what I find fundamentally frivolous about this whole story is that apparently they've discovered a year's worth of rainfall (which is also in the neighborhood of half a million cubic kilometers). Freshwater is not a resource we're running out of. It's merely poorly distributed compared to who wants to use it.
And furthermore, it's not like the rolling blackouts happen to anybody important.
Rolling blackouts? You wouldn't happen to be referring to the California electricity crisis? There are far more successful examples of electricity privatization that you don't hear about because they weren't epic fails.
It's ok if a few poor people in California have to make do without XBox for a while as long as the bankers in Wall Street can run their computers.
While that's quite true, it's also worth remembering that bankers at Wall Street pay for that greater reliability of their electricity supply. They don't magically get better service just because of who they are.
The power companies have a state-granted monopoly for good reason, but part of the tradeoff is being forced to actually serve the interests of the people.
Bad premise leads to bad conclusion. Just because these power companies have a state-granted monopoly, doesn't mean that it was granted for a good reason. For example, a common electricity privatization outcome is to disentangle the generation of power from the transport of power. So a big part of what these electricity companies do, the generation of power, can actually be highly competitive. Even transportation of electricity is not a natural monopoly.
Sure, there's little reason to have more than one line to a given customer, but you could have several competing lines providing power to the local substation.
Slashdot Mirror
This article explains why QE isn't printing money.
That's a flawed premise. And the accounting analysis in that article is terrible. For example, we have this gem:
Bank ABC has only shuffled the composition of its portfolio around. It's exchanged bonds for reserves in what is no more than an asset swap. There is no increase in the size of its balance sheet.
Except that bank ABC swapped risky bonds (the article deceptively labels this "T-bonds" in the chart) for risk-free reserves. And there's another possibility here, that the bank issues risky bonds which are then purchased by the Fed. Low interest loans which can be used to deceptively prop up the balance sheet for a bank or a bankrupt auto company.
Then we go to the Central Bank's accounting sheet. The author claims that the amount of assets accumulated are balanced by "reserve", a liability. But reserve has no meaning for a central bank. There is no obligation attached to having a high or low reserve. This is where the Federal Reserve prints money by having a high reserve.
Go ask the guy who runs Ford if there would still be a Ford if GM and Chrysler had gone under.
They would have been in a sweet market position. Ford is one of the losers in this game because they weren't needy enough to require federal bail out.
One of the huge problems with the US government's GM dealings is that we don't actually know how much they put into GM. Last I checked there was somewhere over two trillion dollars in US bonds owned by the Federal Reserve and they're still printing money this way. That's a lot of debt, including private bonds and an easy, unaccountable way to hide losses.
If this were a private business doing this, we'd be outraged because who knows how many bad deals and losses are being hidden via QE money?
As the summary points out, the bailout prevented the loss of ~1M jobs and 0.6M people losing their pensions.
No. Even in a chapter 7 bankruptcy the job loss would have been less than that. And how many jobs were never created because the US government interfered? We'll never know. The political metric is "jobs created or saved" not "jobs lost or never created in the first place".
Furthermore you seem to be forgetting that in 2008 there was ZERO capital available. Nobody could get capital from the banks because there was no liquidity to be had.
And if GM was a competently run business they wouldn't have needed capital so badly in 2008.
Even if we could have magically waived a wand and provided the capital the engineering would take years. It takes many years to even build a very small auto company like Tesla.
So why is it relevant that some things take a while to do? Does that mean that no one should start a winery or olive orchard because those things take time?
It can cost up to $1-6 billion [...] If you are a company that has never made a car before then it will cost even more.
Telsa Motors didn't spend that kind of money to develop their cars.
Which is fine when the stock market is doing well, and not so hot when it's not.
A collapse of GM would not magically create a bunch of small startups to fill the void. It would mostly just redistribute among the big players.
Actually, the collapse of GM, which is something that's been going on since the 1970s, has grown a lot of rival automobile businesses in the US. They're just owned by foreign companies like Toyota or Mercedes.
I don't know that completing the collapse of GM would create a bunch of start ups, but I do know that bailing GM out won't do that.
Look up the area of arable land per person today and contemplate population growth.
You might want to do that as well. It's worth noting that a lot of rain actually does fall on land (the whole "most of the Earth is water" argument is a huge non sequitur), arable land is relative, and population growth is already controlled in the developed world.
Let alone what would be required to keep that material stably orbiting?
Note that every single component would be a light sail and hence, inherently maneuverable. Similarly, one could deorbit debris via lasers or reflected sunlight.
It has to be worthwhile to do - there has to be a payoff.
You would be harvesting a significant fraction of the radiated energy of a star. That could be used for producing high energy things like processing large volumes of matter or creating large amounts of anti-matter. It could be used to beam power over dozens of light years or propel light sail vehicles to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
I'll just note that we already have a significant step towards Dyson spheres with satellites that are solar powered. From there, there are a few technological hurdles such as a solar power system able to withstand being fairly close to the Sun as well as as the previously mentioned traffic and debris control. There's also some major economic hurdles such as a manufacturing base capable of turning a significant amount of mass into these satellites over a reasonable period of time.
But one doesn't have to break laws of physics, or even develop much in the way of technology past what we have today. It's also an incremental process which doesn't require you to fully embrace or fully complete the strategy in order to obtain benefit from the resulting infrastructure.
My view is that you can trace a clear path from today's technology to something like this. It's extraordinarily ambitious, much like terraforming one of the planets. But it has the feature that it can be detected from far away since one effect is to create a larger lower temperature halo around the star (or even completely obscuring the star altogether).
it's just not possible to build the kind of things you'd see at stellar distances.
Actually, it is. Dyson spheres for example are such a case. One doesn't build them out of a single shell, but rather out of a cloud of satellites. So the hard engineering requirements are that you build a lot of satellites and that you figure out traffic control. Neither is physically impossible.
That structure would be visible to anyone with our level of technology (eg, the Hubble Space Telescope) in our galaxy who has line of sight.
Also there's the matter of local structures. Why aren't there obvious buildings or other structures on Earth or nearby (say on the Moon) from extraterrestrials?
The blackouts were intentionally induced by Enron executives in order to make more money.
They were also intentionally induced by California state officials (who could have stopped the crisis at any time through a variety of means) though motive is a bit uncertain. I'm leaning towards bribes from Enron and related businesses.
The return, better science, better world view, better communications, just think of what happened since that initial investment?
My point exactly. NASA has burned something like a trillion dollars and all we have to show for it is vague happy-speak like the above.
You don't. But they'll still the best tool for a lot of space activities both from capability and cost standpoints.
It would have taken a lot of Lunokhod missions true, but most likely it would have been at a much lower cost.
Than a national prestige mission that happened to have some scientific output as part of the package? A manned exploration program that put some effort into reducing costs would also have been much lower cost than Apollo.
although it is renewable, once you exceed the capacity for the natural system to renew it, you may as well be mining it
I already noted we're not exceeding the capacity of rain. We're not even within a few orders of magnitude of doing so. And why "mine" it when you still need to transport the water to where it'll be used? It's just as hard a transport problem for most of the world as would be transporting fresh rainwater from where it falls to where it is needed.
They were saying similar things about Japan in the 1970s and creating chicken little blockbusters in the 1980s about how Japan was taking over the US. Now, Japan is merely a really big economy without either the ridicule or terror.
Here's the cold, hard facts: For every one of you who win that fucking friend lottery, there are thousands of people who don't.
That sort of observation is only relevant when a) it's actually a "fact", and b) a different bunch of "thousands of people" for each person who won the "friend lottery".
An actual survey found that more than half of all jobs offered were filled internally or by referral. That indicates to me that a lot of people, not merely one in a few thousand, found jobs via the "friend lobby".
I personally, have picked up at least three jobs via the "friend lottery". I don't think I'm even remotely unusual in that.
Too bad the US leaned back on the "we're #1, why try harder" position. Just think where we could be by now.
At some point, they needed to have something in space which generated a return on investment. Apollo didn't do that. And the Shuttle ended up being even worse (for about ten years till 1984, no one in the US could actually launch a payload on a private launch vehicle).
Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price.
It didn't. The scientific output of Apollo was quite remarkable. And there's two simple reasons why. First, they had the best machines of the day, people (which incidentally are still the best machines of the day) gathering samples and running experiments on the surface.
And second, they returned 380 kg of lunar material to be studied for the past few decades. Do you really think a 60s vintage lunar rover is going to get better data on lunar material on location than generations of Earth-based scientists do with a sample return?
All money spent in manned space exploration will pay dividends ultimately, at least a trillion fold.
I have no idea whether you're serious or not. But I'll point out that there are substantial opportunity costs when one burns a few billion on a white elephant rather than something productive.
Before we try and get and that additional freshwater - has anyone found another possible _deposit_ location for all the rubbish and toxic waste we're producing?
Well, there is the ground. That's where we put most of our rubbish and toxic waste. It works pretty well despite the complaints to the contrary.
But if there is a 100 years worth of more energy - why even _try_ and save? Why not even indulge in even more energy-intensive enterprises?
Because the cost is greater than the benefit. Sometimes it actually is worth conserving cheap energy.
The same goes for finding huge amounts of new fresh-water - we'll just find ways to consume it even faster, instead of trying to focus on limiting the damage we do to the planet, and treating any additional resources as 'emergency rations' that we won't touch unless there is no other way.
What's the point of this "focus"? The planet isn't that damaged. The resources in question aren't that depleted.
But what I find fundamentally frivolous about this whole story is that apparently they've discovered a year's worth of rainfall (which is also in the neighborhood of half a million cubic kilometers). Freshwater is not a resource we're running out of. It's merely poorly distributed compared to who wants to use it.
And furthermore, it's not like the rolling blackouts happen to anybody important.
Rolling blackouts? You wouldn't happen to be referring to the California electricity crisis? There are far more successful examples of electricity privatization that you don't hear about because they weren't epic fails.
It's ok if a few poor people in California have to make do without XBox for a while as long as the bankers in Wall Street can run their computers.
While that's quite true, it's also worth remembering that bankers at Wall Street pay for that greater reliability of their electricity supply. They don't magically get better service just because of who they are.
The power companies have a state-granted monopoly for good reason, but part of the tradeoff is being forced to actually serve the interests of the people.
Bad premise leads to bad conclusion. Just because these power companies have a state-granted monopoly, doesn't mean that it was granted for a good reason. For example, a common electricity privatization outcome is to disentangle the generation of power from the transport of power. So a big part of what these electricity companies do, the generation of power, can actually be highly competitive. Even transportation of electricity is not a natural monopoly.
Sure, there's little reason to have more than one line to a given customer, but you could have several competing lines providing power to the local substation.