I think that even in the unlikely event that a mentally ill person were to sneak onto a plane, you could still prevent mass death by not giving said person guns and explosives after they get on the plane.
Right, and the page you linked to refers to Canadian Police records that are shared with the US that contain information on police incidents involving suicide attempts and other issues and states clearly that Canada is not sharing medical records with the US.
If that were the case, then there would be no medical reason for the US to block these passengers from entering the US. A suicide attempt, for example, is not in itself indicative of a medical problem, much less one that would block a passenger from boarding a plane. Also, once you start interpreting police records as medical records, you have just created medical records.
Not whether or not you believe the US should be screening based on this sort of thing is another question. But there could be a case made for it.
Everything is arguable. If you're allowing things on the basis of whether one can make a case for it or not, then anything goes as long as you have the power to make it happen.
They shouldn't, but someone should have the power to exercise the "for no reason or any reason" bit.
Yes, the passenger flying. Nobody else should.
The "not allowed to enter" on medical grounds; can come in handy, if the disease is communicable, highly contagious, highly deadly, and likely to become a pandemic.
Since when has mental depression met those conditions?
But if the surface kills the bacteria when it first lands, then there's nothing to put down the slime in the first place.
It's a chicken and egg problem with the egg already present. We already have many bacteria ready to die on whatever adverse surfaces are out there and we won't run out.
The US can deny anyone entry into their country for any reason or no reason.
While I think we all agree that flying like many activities is something of a privilege. But at the same time, who really thinks it's a good idea to let some preening, unaccountable bureaucrat decide whether or not you should be granted that privilege with no justification needed?
While the commenter goes on to note that US Customs and Border Protection should not have had access to that medical information (with the poster claiming that is the only "deeper issue" at stake), it's interesting how many issues this one incident bring up.
In addition, we have regulations that can block someone from flying on dubious medical grounds. And that US Customs and Border Protection has the authority to block people from merely flying through the US on their way to other foreign locations.
It's like someone knocked a whole crate of worms off the locking dock.
Who's to 'issue new currency' when this one fails?
Why did the original bitcoins take root? Anyone with a computer can issue new currency. And someone like a bitcoin market or a Silk Road wannabe could make a currency with actual trade value.
Where's the problem here? Merely giving something a label doesn't make it a problem. And I notice that the originator of the "Debt Deflation" theory was horribly wrong about the early years of the Great Depression. But let's look at the actual claims here:
1. Debt liquidation and distress selling.
2. Contraction of the money supply as bank loans are paid off.
3. A fall in the level of asset prices.
4. A still greater fall in the net worth of businesses, precipitating bankruptcies.
5. A fall in profits.
6. A reduction in output, in trade and in employment.
7. Pessimism and loss of confidence.
8. Hoarding of money.
9. A fall in nominal interest rates and a rise in deflation-adjusted interest rates.
What here is actually a problem? The problem was the credit bubble which just burst. These are merely corrective measures. For example, I would hope that people in the wake of a credit bubble burst would be more pessimistic and have less confidence. Those are good traits to have in an economy that wasn't as good as previously thought.
But there is no central force that regulates Bitcoins to ensure "safe" level of growth. What if the deflation was 2% a year? What if it was 10%?
There's two things to note here. First, I think that high levels of deflation are no better than high levels of inflation.
In the inflationary case, when inflation is high enough that it modifies the day-to-day behavior of currency holders, that's generally called "hyperinflation". I get a wheelbarrow of money and immediately rush it to the grocery or bank in order to get rid of it as soon as possible - because the money loses measurable value even while I wheel it along.
Similarly, high levels of deflation do, as you correctly note, modify how people use money. I hold onto the money as long as possible, until I really need to use it. I suppose this is called "hyperdeflation".
Just because high levels of deflation are bad, doesn't mean that low levels of deflation are bad.
You could buy seeds, plant them, till the soil, have a great harvest, and still be worse off than if you had just sat on the money for seeds and equipment.
This would be true in either an inflationary or deflationary environment.
If the deflation is at 1%, that's all investments that yield less than 1%.
No. Any investment that yields more than 1%, happens to earn more than 2% in value due to the concurrent increase in value of the underlying currency.
In theory, deflation and inflation are governed by money supply times velocity of money (plus it can be modified, if the currency becomes more or less useful as well, which increases or decreases demand for the currency). But I think with bitcoins, the issue is that a lot of people are putting money into bitcoins as a speculative gamble and greatly overvaluing their worth - classic asset bubble activity. I think most people here agree on that.
For example, bitcoins supposedly rose in value by a factor of ten from the beginning of the year. Did 90% of those coins get destroyed? No. Did they become a factor of ten more useful? No.
This is exactly what we're seeing with bitcoins today. Hardly any real investment in a bitcoin business have been as effective as simply buying bitcoins and riding the pyramid scheme would have been.
I agree mostly, but with an important distinction. Your claim that buying and holding bitcoins is the better strategy assumes that you can sell the bitcoins you're holding at some higher price. Some people have enough bitcoins that they can't sell them off without dropping the price of bitcoins a lot. And I think the bottom will drop out of the market at some point, leading to a substantial decline in the value of bitcoins.
We need a list of things that are known to be wrong with bitcoin that bitcoiners simply think magically aren't a problem.
You're the only person claiming this "need". I'll just point out that the "deflation == bad" idea is not actually backed by the real world any more than "inflation == bad" is.
So what is this problem? Every bitcoin the government destroys means the remaining ones get more valuable. And if for some reason the currency becomes nonviable due to this process, we can always start from scratch with new bitcoins.
As long as interest/investments pay out at a rate higher than inflation
There we go.
Deflation is an entirely different beast, and discourages economic growth in favor of frugality and saving. Those two things don't make the economy run.
Because those two things are irrelevant to making an economy run. An economy will run whether the money it uses (or as the case may be, doesn't use) is inflationary or deflationary. It runs whether the population saves more or less.
The snowden leaks almost seem like a false flag type situation. the scary NSA/CIA/FBI are snooping on you, queue the outrage! Meanwhile every single fucking corporation in the USA is doing the same, with far less oversight, and far spookier goals.
This is so divorced from reality. I hope you're just "false flag" trolling and don't actually believe what you're shoveling.
You cannot embrace the fiat system without having true bubbles
Any sort of nontrivial economic system with actors with imperfect knowledge has bubbles. That's because the participants can't perfectly price everything. And you will still have the feedback from everyone pricing things even a bit more extreme because everyone else is.
I don't see how wanting to reduce the amount of non-compostable, non-recyclable material that is used is immature and irrational. Isn't it much more irrational to simply ignore your problem and ship it to, for example eastern Europe or Africa?
Ok, what makes that irrational? Let's look at actual costs and benefits here. Landfill space costs money and has a bit of an environmental problem. The huge advantage is that the people using such a service don't have to put a lot of time into that.
Recycling has the opposite. It saves a little landfill space at the expense of peoples' time. It also costs money since plastic bags aren't worth recycling (else they would already be doing that without the assistance of the state). I think it's rather obvious that peoples' time and the costs of alternate methods is worth more than slightly higher landfill costs.
Bottom line is that the point of landfills is to save peoples' time - which is also a non-compostable, non-recyclable resource. It also saves money. I think the driving force here is a combination of municipalities trying to push costs off onto their residents and near religious belief that sacrifice, no matter how stupid or counterproductive, is needed to improve the world's environment.
Well, you can print enough money to neutralize any advantage your currency used to have. I was merely pointing out the other big use that props up the value of the US dollar.
At 5 grams per bag and packed to half the density of low density polyethylene (~910 kg/m3), that's a cube 115 meters on a side. Sounds big, but there's plenty of room for it on Earth.
The danger here is that there is some speculation involved
I already see a problem. Speculation isn't inherently bad or dangerous. Among other benefits, it gives an avenue for people to profit from guessing right about the future. I believe one of the many complaints about the private world is that it doesn't do enough thinking about the future. Well, when society treats speculation as a symptom of a disease rather than a vital market function, it helps make societal short-sightedness worse.
A lot of theory suggests that such moves globally might have averted the great depression.
And a lot of theory suggests otherwise. Keynesian spending can be a "hair of the dog" habit-forming behavior. It's worth noting here that I already anticipated this remark with my comments about the fixes to the economic problems around the year 2000 lead shortly to new, more severe economic problems a few short years later. For example, the US Federal Reserve used easy credit to recover from the dotcom burst and 9/11. Then similar strategies were used to grow real estate construction (one of the few growth industries in the mid 2000s). That invariably led to the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. Then various governments mangled their fiscal health with poorly thought out bail outs of banks and such, leading to the current unhealthy situation.
Sure, the latest bit of spending is needed to recover from the previous recovery efforts. But when will it ever end? How do you get off of this treadmill?
There's no contract, social or otherwise that forces you to work for a bad boss. The best solution here is either work somewhere else or get paid a premium for your indulgence.
200 plastic bags per year just isn't that many bags. If you can't recycle them for some reason then dump them in a landfill. If your neck of the woods doesn't have a lot of landfill space, then ship that junk to where there is a lot of landfill space (for example, eastern Europe and Africa). The problem has been solved for centuries.
When I read of European environmental concerns, I'm struck by the immaturity and irrationality of it and proposed solutions. It's a waste of time and effort. How about finding ways to make peoples' lives better instead?
At the scale of the US economy, it's important how people 'feel'. If people feel like things are crashing or will crash, then things will crash. If that means 'printing money' to make people *feel* like things are good, then so be it. Obviously you can't do that indefinitely, but if you have no flexibility then things have historically proven to bubble and crash.
I guess, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. The problem here is twofold. Bubbles and crashes aren't inherently bad in themselves. They're just a manifestation of imperfect knowledge and that's not going away.
They also happen with greater severity when someone tries to game the psychology of economies. The 2007-2008 real estate crash, for example, can be traced back to nation-level policies which freed a lot of easy leverage in North America and Europe for real estate. These policies were enacted in order to recover from various economic problems of 1998-2002.
If the US dollar hyperinflates there will be no question of it. It'll be as if the currency were made of high radioactive nuclear waste. No one will want to hold US dollars even an hour longer than they have to.
Even if you reduce it by an order of magnitude, that's still $60 trillion.
And if you reduce it by two orders of magnitude, that's still $6 trillion.
There's no shortage of money. The only scarcity is the lack of political will to fund basic social services and science. There is no economic or physical necessity preventing us from funding food stamps, science research, health care, a basic income.
I agree that's there's no "shortage of money". But these things which you mention do not have that much value to them. For example, most people earn enough to pay for their own food, health care, and still have a basic income.
Also, efforts to insure that these services are available in turn harms the providing of these services. A lot of effort has been made to turn corn inefficiently into a gasoline additive. The motives are mostly selfish IMHO, but the public justification is protection of the food supply.
And a "basic income" is notorious for making a lot of people unemployable since they aren't worth hiring at the resulting mandated minimum wage, especially with all the other service taxes imposed. And a bunch of the unemployable people don't have incentive to improve since they can get a guaranteed income from the state without much effort.
Finally, it's worth noting that in the US, science remains mostly funded by the private world. My view is that government is only notable in funding science that has poor value to it (for example, big science items like fusion research or the International Space Station). And the FDA probably is the single biggest obstacle to science (via the very expensive regulation and obstruction of medical technologies) in the world today.
The reason there is a shortage of political will is because there is a shortage of value from the things you mention. And given that proposed solutions to these issues have a tendency to either make the problem worse or make it a problem in the first place, I oppose most such efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that even in the unlikely event that a mentally ill person were to sneak onto a plane, you could still prevent mass death by not giving said person guns and explosives after they get on the plane.
Right, and the page you linked to refers to Canadian Police records that are shared with the US that contain information on police incidents involving suicide attempts and other issues and states clearly that Canada is not sharing medical records with the US.
If that were the case, then there would be no medical reason for the US to block these passengers from entering the US. A suicide attempt, for example, is not in itself indicative of a medical problem, much less one that would block a passenger from boarding a plane. Also, once you start interpreting police records as medical records, you have just created medical records.
Not whether or not you believe the US should be screening based on this sort of thing is another question. But there could be a case made for it.
Everything is arguable. If you're allowing things on the basis of whether one can make a case for it or not, then anything goes as long as you have the power to make it happen.
They shouldn't, but someone should have the power to exercise the "for no reason or any reason" bit.
Yes, the passenger flying. Nobody else should.
The "not allowed to enter" on medical grounds; can come in handy, if the disease is communicable, highly contagious, highly deadly, and likely to become a pandemic.
Since when has mental depression met those conditions?
But if the surface kills the bacteria when it first lands, then there's nothing to put down the slime in the first place.
It's a chicken and egg problem with the egg already present. We already have many bacteria ready to die on whatever adverse surfaces are out there and we won't run out.
The US can deny anyone entry into their country for any reason or no reason.
While I think we all agree that flying like many activities is something of a privilege. But at the same time, who really thinks it's a good idea to let some preening, unaccountable bureaucrat decide whether or not you should be granted that privilege with no justification needed?
While the commenter goes on to note that US Customs and Border Protection should not have had access to that medical information (with the poster claiming that is the only "deeper issue" at stake), it's interesting how many issues this one incident bring up.
In addition, we have regulations that can block someone from flying on dubious medical grounds. And that US Customs and Border Protection has the authority to block people from merely flying through the US on their way to other foreign locations.
It's like someone knocked a whole crate of worms off the locking dock.
Who's to 'issue new currency' when this one fails?
Why did the original bitcoins take root? Anyone with a computer can issue new currency. And someone like a bitcoin market or a Silk Road wannabe could make a currency with actual trade value.
1. Debt liquidation and distress selling.
2. Contraction of the money supply as bank loans are paid off.
3. A fall in the level of asset prices.
4. A still greater fall in the net worth of businesses, precipitating bankruptcies.
5. A fall in profits.
6. A reduction in output, in trade and in employment.
7. Pessimism and loss of confidence.
8. Hoarding of money.
9. A fall in nominal interest rates and a rise in deflation-adjusted interest rates.
What here is actually a problem? The problem was the credit bubble which just burst. These are merely corrective measures. For example, I would hope that people in the wake of a credit bubble burst would be more pessimistic and have less confidence. Those are good traits to have in an economy that wasn't as good as previously thought.
But there is no central force that regulates Bitcoins to ensure "safe" level of growth. What if the deflation was 2% a year? What if it was 10%?
There's two things to note here. First, I think that high levels of deflation are no better than high levels of inflation.
In the inflationary case, when inflation is high enough that it modifies the day-to-day behavior of currency holders, that's generally called "hyperinflation". I get a wheelbarrow of money and immediately rush it to the grocery or bank in order to get rid of it as soon as possible - because the money loses measurable value even while I wheel it along.
Similarly, high levels of deflation do, as you correctly note, modify how people use money. I hold onto the money as long as possible, until I really need to use it. I suppose this is called "hyperdeflation".
Just because high levels of deflation are bad, doesn't mean that low levels of deflation are bad.
You could buy seeds, plant them, till the soil, have a great harvest, and still be worse off than if you had just sat on the money for seeds and equipment.
This would be true in either an inflationary or deflationary environment.
If the deflation is at 1%, that's all investments that yield less than 1%.
No. Any investment that yields more than 1%, happens to earn more than 2% in value due to the concurrent increase in value of the underlying currency.
In theory, deflation and inflation are governed by money supply times velocity of money (plus it can be modified, if the currency becomes more or less useful as well, which increases or decreases demand for the currency). But I think with bitcoins, the issue is that a lot of people are putting money into bitcoins as a speculative gamble and greatly overvaluing their worth - classic asset bubble activity. I think most people here agree on that.
For example, bitcoins supposedly rose in value by a factor of ten from the beginning of the year. Did 90% of those coins get destroyed? No. Did they become a factor of ten more useful? No.
This is exactly what we're seeing with bitcoins today. Hardly any real investment in a bitcoin business have been as effective as simply buying bitcoins and riding the pyramid scheme would have been.
I agree mostly, but with an important distinction. Your claim that buying and holding bitcoins is the better strategy assumes that you can sell the bitcoins you're holding at some higher price. Some people have enough bitcoins that they can't sell them off without dropping the price of bitcoins a lot. And I think the bottom will drop out of the market at some point, leading to a substantial decline in the value of bitcoins.
We need a list of things that are known to be wrong with bitcoin that bitcoiners simply think magically aren't a problem.
You're the only person claiming this "need". I'll just point out that the "deflation == bad" idea is not actually backed by the real world any more than "inflation == bad" is.
So what is this problem? Every bitcoin the government destroys means the remaining ones get more valuable. And if for some reason the currency becomes nonviable due to this process, we can always start from scratch with new bitcoins.
As long as interest/investments pay out at a rate higher than inflation
There we go.
Deflation is an entirely different beast, and discourages economic growth in favor of frugality and saving. Those two things don't make the economy run.
Because those two things are irrelevant to making an economy run. An economy will run whether the money it uses (or as the case may be, doesn't use) is inflationary or deflationary. It runs whether the population saves more or less.
The snowden leaks almost seem like a false flag type situation. the scary NSA/CIA/FBI are snooping on you, queue the outrage! Meanwhile every single fucking corporation in the USA is doing the same, with far less oversight, and far spookier goals.
This is so divorced from reality. I hope you're just "false flag" trolling and don't actually believe what you're shoveling.
Selling bitcoin now isn't tempting fate so much as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
At a sudden $1000 per bitcoin, that's a really generous return on spite.
You cannot embrace the fiat system without having true bubbles
Any sort of nontrivial economic system with actors with imperfect knowledge has bubbles. That's because the participants can't perfectly price everything. And you will still have the feedback from everyone pricing things even a bit more extreme because everyone else is.
I don't see how wanting to reduce the amount of non-compostable, non-recyclable material that is used is immature and irrational. Isn't it much more irrational to simply ignore your problem and ship it to, for example eastern Europe or Africa?
Ok, what makes that irrational? Let's look at actual costs and benefits here. Landfill space costs money and has a bit of an environmental problem. The huge advantage is that the people using such a service don't have to put a lot of time into that.
Recycling has the opposite. It saves a little landfill space at the expense of peoples' time. It also costs money since plastic bags aren't worth recycling (else they would already be doing that without the assistance of the state). I think it's rather obvious that peoples' time and the costs of alternate methods is worth more than slightly higher landfill costs.
Bottom line is that the point of landfills is to save peoples' time - which is also a non-compostable, non-recyclable resource. It also saves money. I think the driving force here is a combination of municipalities trying to push costs off onto their residents and near religious belief that sacrifice, no matter how stupid or counterproductive, is needed to improve the world's environment.
Well, you can print enough money to neutralize any advantage your currency used to have. I was merely pointing out the other big use that props up the value of the US dollar.
So.. You make other lives better by shipping your waste to them?!
It's not happening for free. So yes, you are making other lives better by shipping your waste to them.
At 5 grams per bag and packed to half the density of low density polyethylene (~910 kg/m3), that's a cube 115 meters on a side. Sounds big, but there's plenty of room for it on Earth.
The danger here is that there is some speculation involved
I already see a problem. Speculation isn't inherently bad or dangerous. Among other benefits, it gives an avenue for people to profit from guessing right about the future. I believe one of the many complaints about the private world is that it doesn't do enough thinking about the future. Well, when society treats speculation as a symptom of a disease rather than a vital market function, it helps make societal short-sightedness worse.
A lot of theory suggests that such moves globally might have averted the great depression.
And a lot of theory suggests otherwise. Keynesian spending can be a "hair of the dog" habit-forming behavior. It's worth noting here that I already anticipated this remark with my comments about the fixes to the economic problems around the year 2000 lead shortly to new, more severe economic problems a few short years later. For example, the US Federal Reserve used easy credit to recover from the dotcom burst and 9/11. Then similar strategies were used to grow real estate construction (one of the few growth industries in the mid 2000s). That invariably led to the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. Then various governments mangled their fiscal health with poorly thought out bail outs of banks and such, leading to the current unhealthy situation.
Sure, the latest bit of spending is needed to recover from the previous recovery efforts. But when will it ever end? How do you get off of this treadmill?
The one thing keeping the dollar from hyperinflating is the fact that oil transactions are done in USD.
And that 350 million people have to pay their taxes in US dollars.
There's no contract, social or otherwise that forces you to work for a bad boss. The best solution here is either work somewhere else or get paid a premium for your indulgence.
200 plastic bags per year just isn't that many bags. If you can't recycle them for some reason then dump them in a landfill. If your neck of the woods doesn't have a lot of landfill space, then ship that junk to where there is a lot of landfill space (for example, eastern Europe and Africa). The problem has been solved for centuries.
When I read of European environmental concerns, I'm struck by the immaturity and irrationality of it and proposed solutions. It's a waste of time and effort. How about finding ways to make peoples' lives better instead?
At the scale of the US economy, it's important how people 'feel'. If people feel like things are crashing or will crash, then things will crash. If that means 'printing money' to make people *feel* like things are good, then so be it. Obviously you can't do that indefinitely, but if you have no flexibility then things have historically proven to bubble and crash.
I guess, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. The problem here is twofold. Bubbles and crashes aren't inherently bad in themselves. They're just a manifestation of imperfect knowledge and that's not going away.
They also happen with greater severity when someone tries to game the psychology of economies. The 2007-2008 real estate crash, for example, can be traced back to nation-level policies which freed a lot of easy leverage in North America and Europe for real estate. These policies were enacted in order to recover from various economic problems of 1998-2002.
If the US dollar hyperinflates there will be no question of it. It'll be as if the currency were made of high radioactive nuclear waste. No one will want to hold US dollars even an hour longer than they have to.
Even if you reduce it by an order of magnitude, that's still $60 trillion.
And if you reduce it by two orders of magnitude, that's still $6 trillion.
There's no shortage of money. The only scarcity is the lack of political will to fund basic social services and science. There is no economic or physical necessity preventing us from funding food stamps, science research, health care, a basic income.
I agree that's there's no "shortage of money". But these things which you mention do not have that much value to them. For example, most people earn enough to pay for their own food, health care, and still have a basic income.
Also, efforts to insure that these services are available in turn harms the providing of these services. A lot of effort has been made to turn corn inefficiently into a gasoline additive. The motives are mostly selfish IMHO, but the public justification is protection of the food supply.
And a "basic income" is notorious for making a lot of people unemployable since they aren't worth hiring at the resulting mandated minimum wage, especially with all the other service taxes imposed. And a bunch of the unemployable people don't have incentive to improve since they can get a guaranteed income from the state without much effort.
Finally, it's worth noting that in the US, science remains mostly funded by the private world. My view is that government is only notable in funding science that has poor value to it (for example, big science items like fusion research or the International Space Station). And the FDA probably is the single biggest obstacle to science (via the very expensive regulation and obstruction of medical technologies) in the world today.
The reason there is a shortage of political will is because there is a shortage of value from the things you mention. And given that proposed solutions to these issues have a tendency to either make the problem worse or make it a problem in the first place, I oppose most such efforts.