Post a bond, say which is invested in the NASDAQ index, for example, that pays off when the university lets the professor go for any reason other than something that would get a tenured professor fired.
That's a pretty fancy name for medium of exchange. Again, you assumed a flawed premise, here that a "ticketing system" is somehow different from a "medium of exchange". The obvious glossed over element is that the "ticketing" here is done via trading units of currency for things of value. Thus the currency is assuming its usual role of being a medium of exchange.
Think of wikipedia, open source, slashdot comments. Why are you exchanging comments with me right now? There is no currency involved. Why can't all trading be like this? I grow food because I have a green thumb, because I enjoy it, because I have everything else I want and what I choose to do is grow food for fun. And/or, a robot grows food.
Well, how much food can I get with a great Slashdot post? I can't? Well, there you go. The exchange is happening because we value to some degree either each others' comments or the opportunity to make our own comments. I wouldn't be able to feed myself on Slashdot posts.
Currency is a step on the way towards developing the technology for each of us to enjoy maximum freedom, simultaneously. Capitalism, fetishizing scarcity, creates it unnecessarily and slows down the advance of knowledge and technology.
"Fetishizing scarcity" happens to be the smart move right now. That's because most things are scarce, irrespective of the presence of capitalism.
Eh, I think it's warranted. For a supposed bastion of the intellect, academia is surprisingly non-intellectual, like drug dealing. And that irrationality is baked in and institutionalized (like training (excuse me, "educating") way too many graduate students for degrees which are known to have vastly fewer available positions).
I wonder how many of the subsequent examples will turn out to be shams. It has to be possible for technology to help education. For example, I routinely interact online with people from the rest of the world. But in practice, I've had mostly negative experiences with technology in the classroom.
The positive experiences I recall: displaying complex data like charts and such and enabling a professor bound to a wheelchair to project their written words on a screen (both which incidentally could be done with an overhead projector). I've also had some positive experiences with remote teaching and computer lab classrooms which are oriented around study of particular software.
The rest just seems like a very expensive way to implement cheap technologies that already work. It's a way to turn a thousand dollar blackboard into a ten thousand dollar blackboard.
"it's cool and important for its own sake, how can you possibly not get that?" argument
Because there's nothing to "get" about the argument. For me, it's conditional. If I build a table top fusion experiment with my own money, that's cool. When I do it with someone else's money, who had no choice in the matter, and only do it to pull a paycheck, well, that's far less cool.
And despite the blazing fast assistance of the US government it took more than a quarter of a century? What makes you think this would have gone slower without government assistance?
I notice, for example, that Stanford University sat for a long time on the world's first ethernet switch, only licensing it six years later to Cisco (who had already stolen the technology). That wouldn't have taken so long, if they had been accustomed to moving technologies from academia to the business world.
Capitalism is slow to uptake most of the good ideas. AT&T resisted the idea of the internet, because it didn't fit in with their business model of telephones.
AT&T was a government enforced monopoly until 1984. I think that dissolution was a huge sea change for things like the internet, cell phone networks, etc.
Dealers profit from market inefficiency, inserting themselves as middlemen and profiting by pushing prices away from their efficient levels.
"Pushing prices away"? If you have a "dealer" trading away from the "efficient levels" and a "dealer" trading towards the "efficient levels", I can tell you who will have money at the end of the day and who won't.
Someone who pursues a dumb strategy is going to lose their wealth to someone who isn't.
Why not just let ultimate lenders and borrowers meet with technology, obsoleting the "market makers" raising prices because of their profit-seeking motives?
That's the stock markets in a nutshell. Yet they still end up with market makers.
Why not put in a one year delay so everyone can be on an equal footing with the people who trade once in a blue moon? In my view, there's no reason to equalize trading for human traders.
I'm kinda bored and it's a slow news day. Let's do "jail the crazies".
Plus there was that Canadian citizen who was blocked from air travel through a US airport (wasn't even stopping in the US) just because Canadian law enforcement had passed on to US Customs and Border Protection information about an mental illness related interaction she had with the Canadian police.
The whole capitalist system is built on an artificial imposition of scarcity of liquidity.
Premise is flawed. That leads to conclusions that are flawed.
The real premise behind advocacy for capitalism is that capital is treated better and is more productive when owned by the private world, the people who use it. You're speaking of currencies as your examples demonstrated which is not inherently a feature of capitalism. You can have a capitalist society with barter or gift economies too.
So let's go to the real question. What is the primary purposes of currency? To be a convenient medium of exchange and a temporary store of value. Scarcity whether natural or artificial is implied as a result of the latter property.
Here's the reasoning. Suppose I have a plentiful currency which has value. Plentiful here means that I can acquire certain amounts at arbitrary low effort per unit of currency (else the currency would actually be scarce). Then I can exchange it for a good of value.
But look at this trade from the point of view of the party providing the good. That party could also acquire more currency from the mechanism providing the plentiful supply.
So from their point of view, the amount of currency in the trade has to be greater than the currency they could acquire by accessing the plentiful source. But the latter can be arbitrarily low in cost, hence there is no incentive to actually bother to sell the good. They can get more just by pulling the magic currency lever.
This leads to a contradiction since the currency was originally assumed to have held value and hence, be worth trading for. Hence, the currency has to be scarce in order to hold value.
So instead of trusting the banks to meet the demand for liquidity, just create it and give it directly to people.
And why is that currency going to have even a scrap of value? You won't have liquidity, if no one can be bothered to trade the currency because it has no value.
As long as we keep advancing knowledge and technology, we can create as much money as we feel like, because knowledge is what is likely to raise survival fitness the most by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Why would that happen? Again, flawed premise leads to flawed conclusions. My take is that viable (and scarce) currencies were found to replace the current one and the economy would move on.
So how would you definitely proof that there is no one who knows whether a god exists?
Well, an existing god for starters would probably know that. You have to bootstrap from the supernatural side and make the supernatural, natural. Nobody seems inclined to do so at the moment.
Academic freedom != tenure. Obviously, if the university can fire you for saying controversial or inconvenient, but scientifically valid things, then that's not academic freedom. Indefinite tenure is meant to address that, but it's not the only way to do so.
Because a true agnostic knows not only that he doesn't know whether there is a god, but also that he has no way of knowing if someone else does know it.
No. Because there still is the possibility of some sort of definitive proof. Although how you would show that an omnipotent, omniscient god exists to an organism which is inherently extremely limited in what it can perceive or do sounds rather impossible to me. There's only so much input a human can receive over a finite life span and only so many internal state changes (including thinking) that the human can do over that life span.
the best that was possible considering the kind of temper tantrums we see in resistance to what is obviously better
Nonsense. Let's start with the obvious rebuttal to "obviously better": no incentives to reduce health care costs.
universal healthcare is next, which works in all of our social and economic peers
Because the US government has demonstrated that it's going to do a great job with that. And to belabor the obvious, universal health care already existed, you just had to pay for it, yourself.
but we're not aiming for perfect
How is Obamacare more perfect than say, reversing every scrap of health care and health insurance regulation back to the 60s? I'm just not seeing it.
Do you have a point to make you can back up with some actual facts or are you just chicken little-ing?
The health insurance subsidies pay all but a fixed percentage of the subject's income. So if health insurance for a policy doubles in cost, it still appears fixed in cost to the subsidized person buying the insurance. This is a huge inflationary dynamic that just got inserted into health care and it'll get worse when employer-based policies are subject to this new regulation next year.
That's what happened with higher education in the US. A bunch of subsidized loans and financial aid programs created a market where prospective college students could borrow arbitrary amounts of money and were insulated for a time from the actual costs of their education. That resulted in higher education costs rising several times faster than inflation in other parts of the economy.
So what happens when the unsubsidized insurees see huge cost increases in their health insurance and the federal government sees huge cost increases from health insurance subsidies? For the former, we see even more incentive to act in ways that shift cost to others, such as deliberately earning less so that one can qualify for subsidies or dropping health insurance altogether until its need is perceived.
For the federal government, we'll see a huge incentive to push more people onto Medicare/Medicaid, because that is cheaper for the federal government. And then, incentive to reduce costs of the Medicare/Medicaid programs by reducing the services provided or the quality of the services provided.
These are classic tragedy of the commons problems.
No optimism needed. I pay our bill each month right now so I know to the penny what we currently pay and I have gotten quotes directly from Blue Cross and Priority Health for what coverage they will get next year. The full cost of the plan *will* be less than it is now (by about half for most) and their out of pocket will in most cases be equal or less as well. This is not supposition on my part. I'm merely reporting what our company has experienced.
There is an obvious legal saying that applies here, "past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results". You may have as you claim saved a few pennies today. But in the process, medical care has via subsidized medical insurance become even more inflationary than it was.
We still have yet to see the employer mandate kick in. I foresee that will result in a lot of people dropped from employer-based health insurance plans, particularly if the part time loophole isn't patched (that is, the tactic of employing enough people who work less than 30 hours so that the total number of people who work more than 30 hours is less than 50, a big Obamacare threshold).
High speed trading does not seem to me to do this in any way, it is simply a zero-sum game where real resources (in high speed computers and data links) are used in a way that does not increase overall productivity. It is not unique in this, bitcoin mining is also inefficient in that it consumes real resources to produce an artificially scarce good to use as a medium of exchange.
Just because you don't perceive a net value from these activities, doesn't mean that they don't exist. The fundamental indication that value is created is that trade happens.
It would be more efficient (but would lose other advantages) if there were a central repository of free to generate but limited number "coins" that were directly exchanged for money.
Why would that be more efficient? How is the central repository going to get anyone to use their coins? How do we keep the central repository from creating more coins whenever it deems it convenient?
Any means for the market to extract revenue from trade will result in trade inefficiencies. So stock markets are indirectly keeping liquidity artificially scarce in order to increase revenue from providing faster market access.
It's honestly taking advantage of market inefficiencies to profit without contributing any value.
That describes most economic activities. If I shop at the local grocery, the local grocery is taking advantage of the market inefficiency of food not automatically being in my refrigerator.
It was legal for Magnetar to sell RMBS that they had long CDS positions on, without telling the buyer that.
Ok, so what? If Magnetar was in the least responsible for those RMBS after the sell, then the CDS would have covered any costs they incurred. It'd also help cover the costs of the RMBS market drying up, should a bunch of RMBS securities fail.
Slashdot Mirror
What are some better ways?
Post a bond, say which is invested in the NASDAQ index, for example, that pays off when the university lets the professor go for any reason other than something that would get a tenured professor fired.
That's such a pastafarian thing to say.
No, currency is a ticketing system.
That's a pretty fancy name for medium of exchange. Again, you assumed a flawed premise, here that a "ticketing system" is somehow different from a "medium of exchange". The obvious glossed over element is that the "ticketing" here is done via trading units of currency for things of value. Thus the currency is assuming its usual role of being a medium of exchange.
Think of wikipedia, open source, slashdot comments. Why are you exchanging comments with me right now? There is no currency involved. Why can't all trading be like this? I grow food because I have a green thumb, because I enjoy it, because I have everything else I want and what I choose to do is grow food for fun. And/or, a robot grows food.
Well, how much food can I get with a great Slashdot post? I can't? Well, there you go. The exchange is happening because we value to some degree either each others' comments or the opportunity to make our own comments. I wouldn't be able to feed myself on Slashdot posts.
Currency is a step on the way towards developing the technology for each of us to enjoy maximum freedom, simultaneously. Capitalism, fetishizing scarcity, creates it unnecessarily and slows down the advance of knowledge and technology.
"Fetishizing scarcity" happens to be the smart move right now. That's because most things are scarce, irrespective of the presence of capitalism.
Eh, I think it's warranted. For a supposed bastion of the intellect, academia is surprisingly non-intellectual, like drug dealing. And that irrationality is baked in and institutionalized (like training (excuse me, "educating") way too many graduate students for degrees which are known to have vastly fewer available positions).
They'd be "hoes". Opinion doesn't matter and you're there to be used by the faculty.
I wonder how many of the subsequent examples will turn out to be shams. It has to be possible for technology to help education. For example, I routinely interact online with people from the rest of the world. But in practice, I've had mostly negative experiences with technology in the classroom.
The positive experiences I recall: displaying complex data like charts and such and enabling a professor bound to a wheelchair to project their written words on a screen (both which incidentally could be done with an overhead projector). I've also had some positive experiences with remote teaching and computer lab classrooms which are oriented around study of particular software.
The rest just seems like a very expensive way to implement cheap technologies that already work. It's a way to turn a thousand dollar blackboard into a ten thousand dollar blackboard.
"it's cool and important for its own sake, how can you possibly not get that?" argument
Because there's nothing to "get" about the argument. For me, it's conditional. If I build a table top fusion experiment with my own money, that's cool. When I do it with someone else's money, who had no choice in the matter, and only do it to pull a paycheck, well, that's far less cool.
I notice, for example, that Stanford University sat for a long time on the world's first ethernet switch, only licensing it six years later to Cisco (who had already stolen the technology). That wouldn't have taken so long, if they had been accustomed to moving technologies from academia to the business world.
Capitalism is slow to uptake most of the good ideas. AT&T resisted the idea of the internet, because it didn't fit in with their business model of telephones.
AT&T was a government enforced monopoly until 1984. I think that dissolution was a huge sea change for things like the internet, cell phone networks, etc.
Dealers profit from market inefficiency, inserting themselves as middlemen and profiting by pushing prices away from their efficient levels.
"Pushing prices away"? If you have a "dealer" trading away from the "efficient levels" and a "dealer" trading towards the "efficient levels", I can tell you who will have money at the end of the day and who won't.
Someone who pursues a dumb strategy is going to lose their wealth to someone who isn't.
Why not just let ultimate lenders and borrowers meet with technology, obsoleting the "market makers" raising prices because of their profit-seeking motives?
That's the stock markets in a nutshell. Yet they still end up with market makers.
Why not put in a one year delay so everyone can be on an equal footing with the people who trade once in a blue moon? In my view, there's no reason to equalize trading for human traders.
The irony here is that he was trying to rescue people from the clutches of psychiatry. Out of the pot and into the fire.
Gotta solve the unemployment problem somehow.
I'm kinda bored and it's a slow news day. Let's do "jail the crazies".
Plus there was that Canadian citizen who was blocked from air travel through a US airport (wasn't even stopping in the US) just because Canadian law enforcement had passed on to US Customs and Border Protection information about an mental illness related interaction she had with the Canadian police.
There's some deep issues here.
The whole capitalist system is built on an artificial imposition of scarcity of liquidity.
Premise is flawed. That leads to conclusions that are flawed.
The real premise behind advocacy for capitalism is that capital is treated better and is more productive when owned by the private world, the people who use it. You're speaking of currencies as your examples demonstrated which is not inherently a feature of capitalism. You can have a capitalist society with barter or gift economies too.
So let's go to the real question. What is the primary purposes of currency? To be a convenient medium of exchange and a temporary store of value. Scarcity whether natural or artificial is implied as a result of the latter property.
Here's the reasoning. Suppose I have a plentiful currency which has value. Plentiful here means that I can acquire certain amounts at arbitrary low effort per unit of currency (else the currency would actually be scarce). Then I can exchange it for a good of value.
But look at this trade from the point of view of the party providing the good. That party could also acquire more currency from the mechanism providing the plentiful supply.
So from their point of view, the amount of currency in the trade has to be greater than the currency they could acquire by accessing the plentiful source. But the latter can be arbitrarily low in cost, hence there is no incentive to actually bother to sell the good. They can get more just by pulling the magic currency lever.
This leads to a contradiction since the currency was originally assumed to have held value and hence, be worth trading for. Hence, the currency has to be scarce in order to hold value.
So instead of trusting the banks to meet the demand for liquidity, just create it and give it directly to people.
And why is that currency going to have even a scrap of value? You won't have liquidity, if no one can be bothered to trade the currency because it has no value.
As long as we keep advancing knowledge and technology, we can create as much money as we feel like, because knowledge is what is likely to raise survival fitness the most by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Why would that happen? Again, flawed premise leads to flawed conclusions. My take is that viable (and scarce) currencies were found to replace the current one and the economy would move on.
Well, that's not the trade itself. And how is that relevant to a case where no one is making deception representations of their actions?
So how would you definitely proof that there is no one who knows whether a god exists?
Well, an existing god for starters would probably know that. You have to bootstrap from the supernatural side and make the supernatural, natural. Nobody seems inclined to do so at the moment.
There were some things that stayed scary even when they don't change for centuries. Nobody gets accustomed to the Spanish Inquisition.
Academic freedom != tenure. Obviously, if the university can fire you for saying controversial or inconvenient, but scientifically valid things, then that's not academic freedom. Indefinite tenure is meant to address that, but it's not the only way to do so.
Because a true agnostic knows not only that he doesn't know whether there is a god, but also that he has no way of knowing if someone else does know it.
No. Because there still is the possibility of some sort of definitive proof. Although how you would show that an omnipotent, omniscient god exists to an organism which is inherently extremely limited in what it can perceive or do sounds rather impossible to me. There's only so much input a human can receive over a finite life span and only so many internal state changes (including thinking) that the human can do over that life span.
insert long winded scientific explanation of chain reactions that sounds just as outlandish as "a wizzard did it" to most people.
No. I imagine the usual explanation is that someone came up with a great story which didn't really happen the way that they claimed.
the best that was possible considering the kind of temper tantrums we see in resistance to what is obviously better
Nonsense. Let's start with the obvious rebuttal to "obviously better": no incentives to reduce health care costs.
universal healthcare is next, which works in all of our social and economic peers
Because the US government has demonstrated that it's going to do a great job with that. And to belabor the obvious, universal health care already existed, you just had to pay for it, yourself.
but we're not aiming for perfect
How is Obamacare more perfect than say, reversing every scrap of health care and health insurance regulation back to the 60s? I'm just not seeing it.
Do you have a point to make you can back up with some actual facts or are you just chicken little-ing?
The health insurance subsidies pay all but a fixed percentage of the subject's income. So if health insurance for a policy doubles in cost, it still appears fixed in cost to the subsidized person buying the insurance. This is a huge inflationary dynamic that just got inserted into health care and it'll get worse when employer-based policies are subject to this new regulation next year.
That's what happened with higher education in the US. A bunch of subsidized loans and financial aid programs created a market where prospective college students could borrow arbitrary amounts of money and were insulated for a time from the actual costs of their education. That resulted in higher education costs rising several times faster than inflation in other parts of the economy.
So what happens when the unsubsidized insurees see huge cost increases in their health insurance and the federal government sees huge cost increases from health insurance subsidies? For the former, we see even more incentive to act in ways that shift cost to others, such as deliberately earning less so that one can qualify for subsidies or dropping health insurance altogether until its need is perceived.
For the federal government, we'll see a huge incentive to push more people onto Medicare/Medicaid, because that is cheaper for the federal government. And then, incentive to reduce costs of the Medicare/Medicaid programs by reducing the services provided or the quality of the services provided.
These are classic tragedy of the commons problems.
No optimism needed. I pay our bill each month right now so I know to the penny what we currently pay and I have gotten quotes directly from Blue Cross and Priority Health for what coverage they will get next year. The full cost of the plan *will* be less than it is now (by about half for most) and their out of pocket will in most cases be equal or less as well. This is not supposition on my part. I'm merely reporting what our company has experienced.
There is an obvious legal saying that applies here, "past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results". You may have as you claim saved a few pennies today. But in the process, medical care has via subsidized medical insurance become even more inflationary than it was.
We still have yet to see the employer mandate kick in. I foresee that will result in a lot of people dropped from employer-based health insurance plans, particularly if the part time loophole isn't patched (that is, the tactic of employing enough people who work less than 30 hours so that the total number of people who work more than 30 hours is less than 50, a big Obamacare threshold).
High speed trading does not seem to me to do this in any way, it is simply a zero-sum game where real resources (in high speed computers and data links) are used in a way that does not increase overall productivity. It is not unique in this, bitcoin mining is also inefficient in that it consumes real resources to produce an artificially scarce good to use as a medium of exchange.
Just because you don't perceive a net value from these activities, doesn't mean that they don't exist. The fundamental indication that value is created is that trade happens.
It would be more efficient (but would lose other advantages) if there were a central repository of free to generate but limited number "coins" that were directly exchanged for money.
Why would that be more efficient? How is the central repository going to get anyone to use their coins? How do we keep the central repository from creating more coins whenever it deems it convenient?
Why should liquidity be kept artficially scarce?
Any means for the market to extract revenue from trade will result in trade inefficiencies. So stock markets are indirectly keeping liquidity artificially scarce in order to increase revenue from providing faster market access.
It's honestly taking advantage of market inefficiencies to profit without contributing any value.
That describes most economic activities. If I shop at the local grocery, the local grocery is taking advantage of the market inefficiency of food not automatically being in my refrigerator.
It was legal for Magnetar to sell RMBS that they had long CDS positions on, without telling the buyer that.
Ok, so what? If Magnetar was in the least responsible for those RMBS after the sell, then the CDS would have covered any costs they incurred. It'd also help cover the costs of the RMBS market drying up, should a bunch of RMBS securities fail.